My iPod is drunk again
I have over 11,000 songs on my iPod and it is set permanently to shuffle. If I’m not mistaken, that means that each time a song ends, the chances of any other song coming up is at least 1 in 11,000. And yet, in the past 30 minutes my iPod has played four David Bowie songs, all from Diamond Dogs. Diamond Dogs!
This happens every few weeks. Not Diamond Dogs necessarily, but something. It will play the same song twice in an hour, or a long string of Elvis Costello, or a whole hour of depressing, nostalgic songs pining for home and times gone by and lost love. It went on a Leonard Cohen kick one afternoon and I had to shut it down and re-start it before it would play anything else.
Code 46, Dark City, Metropolis
Texture is important.
These three movies have very little to do with each other, except that they are set in imaginary societies where people’s freedoms are curtailed in ways we would find objectionable, and they were all at the video store at the same time as I was looking for Futuristic Dystopias to study. And I suppose you could say that all three have male leads who are very good actors but stop short of being movie stars.
(Incidentally, if there’s one thing all nightmare futures have in common, its that they all predict less freedom for their citizens. Why won’t anyone make a movie about a nightmare future where everyone has too much freedom? Well, I suppose that’s Idiocracy, actually.)
For my purposes here, they also all point to the importance of texture in this kind of movie. I know this from Blade Runner, but Ridley Scott knew it from Metropolis. If you get it wrong, your dark, futurist nightmare dates quickly, feels constrained and silly. If you get it right, the texture makes the movie worth watching all by itself.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, for instance, is an example of a movie with a lot on its mind, but very little effort is spent on making us believe we are seeing the future. The Island, meanwhile, has expended tons of effort in bringing us a vision of the future, but has very little on its mind.
SPOILER ALERT
The future of Code 46 seems completely plausible, almost here already. The cars are the same cars we drive now and the buildings are the same ones we work in. Apartments are smaller and have computer screens built into glass walls, and some quirky new words have worked their way into the language (like “papelle” and “cover” and “outside”), but there have been no radical leaps forward in fashion or architecture. Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton meet and fall in love and that creates problems for them, but none of the weird things they have in their lives feel any more novel to them as computers and cell phones seem to us. Designer “viruses” are just a part of their everyday life, along with “new fingers” and “memory albums” and the remote possibility of having sex with the clone of one’s mother. Director Michael Winterbottom even has the actors pitch their dialogue in a rushed murmur so that we have to lean forward to catch what they’re saying. It doesn’t feel like a movie about the future, it feels like a movie from the future, in the same way that Barry Lyndon feels like a movie about the 18th century made in the 18th century.
Dark City is a, well, it’s a weird movie. A bunch of aliens have abducted a bunch of Earthlings and built a pretend city for them in the middle of space so they can study them and learn about the human soul. For some reason, they’ve decided to make the city a Fake New York circa 1940s. At the end of every day, the aliens stop time and rearrange the city, along with everyone’s lives, then start up time again to see how people react. Rufus Sewell is an Earthling who, for whatever reason, cottons to the aliens’ plan and finds himself able to rearrange physical matter his own self. (The movie is so weird that telling you all this doesn’t really even give anything away — all this is revealed within Act I.) The texture here is overstuffed, overheated, delirious. Cityscapes are obviously, unapologetically miniatures or computer-generated, doorways melt or appear out of nowhere, leading to streets, outer space or plunges. Furniture stretches, walls expand, dishes and tchotchkes appear out of nowhere. Streets are too narrow and lead to nowhere, everything feels like a movie set, which is partly the point. It all works toward creating a sense that anything might happen. Sort of funhouse version of The Matrix.
Metropolis is still the gold standard for this kind of movie. The sets and effects, mind-blowing for their time, are still mind-blowing 80 years later. The plot makes as much sense as Dark City, with the same kind of delirium present as well, but also carries with it a Serious Message about class warfare. The son of an industrialist falls in love with a mysterious crusader and learns about the sorry life of the workers who make Metropolis run. The industrialist father, wishing to put the woman’s crusade to an end, asks a scientist friend to give his newly-created robot the face of the crusader, then train the robot to go and tell the workers to give up. The scientist has his own personal vendetta against the industrialist and gives the robot-woman instructions to get the workers to revolt against the city thus provoking an apocolypse that threatens to kill the workers’ children, start a revolution and kill the industrialist’s son. With a plot like that, the visuals better be pretty fantastic, and Metropolis does not disappoint; it’s stuffed full of gigantic, complex sets with swelling tides of humanity coursing through them. And the special-effects aren’t impressive “for their time,” they’re impressive for, say, 1977. The effect is incalcuable. The mighty cityscapes with their elevated walkways, spotless streets and canyon-like vantages give an impression of overwhelming inhumanity while still maintaining their beauty and power.
(The theme of Metropolis, stated many times throughout, is “The Head and Hands must have a Mediator, which must be the Heart.” Lang doesn’t seem to be arguing that the upper class is bad, just that they need to keep in touch with the lower class who make their machines run and maybe don’t be so cruel to them. Otherwise they seem to be perfectly nice people.)
The current Kino Video release is also the most complete assemblage of film elements of this movie and a near-complete restoration, and the results are jaw-dropping. The print looks brand-new, scratchless, spotless, bright and lustrous. As an added bonus, the score of the original run has been re-recorded, the goal being to present the movie as close as possible to its original premiere. I’ve seen Metropolis before, but this felt like a completely different movie.
Jules et Jim
This is my idea of a holiday. I have no meetings for a week, I don’t have to think about Futuristic Dystopias or Moby-Dick or The End of the World for a few days, so I can indulge myself and watch a movie like Jules et Jim. It is especially gratifying to see this after watching the stiff, leaden Fahrenheit 451, made a scant three years later. It couldn’t possibly be more different and could have used one-tenth of the energy or powers of observation that Jules et Jim has.
I was reading an interview with Woody Allen where he talks about Bullets Over Broadway and how he loved shooting Husbands and Wives with the hand-held shaky-cam jump-cut style but that you couldn’t do that with a period piece because people have a certain mindset about how the past should look on film. But that’s exactly how Truffaut shoots the same time period in Jules et Jim, tossing in freeze-frames and wild pans and rushed zooms and a dozen other techniques that remind you that you’re watching a brand-new movie about events fifty years in the past. The first act of the picture, where Jules and Jim meet Catherine and World War I hasn’t happened yet, is so breathlessly (pun not intended — at least I don’t think so) shot and edited and with such quicksilver energy that it takes a moment to realize that everyone is wearing funny clothes and driving vintage automobiles. Truffaut cuts as often as Michael Bay; scenes and images fly by with the speedof fleeting memories. How it was all shot I have no idea, all those shots of adventures glimpsed but not explained. Did Truffaut board all those scenes (did he board anything)? Were they scenes that once had dialogue but got cut out, except for those brief shots? It seems like there are dozens of them.
For those unfamiliar with the movie, Jules and Jim are best friends living la vie Boheme in belle epoque Paris. Jules meets Catherine and they fall in love. Catherine is a capricious, complicated woman who also falls in love with Jim, but events conspire to put her together with Jules. They get married and have a child, but Catherine is restless and inconstant and still wants Jim (among other men). Instead of leaving Jules with the child, they invite Jim to live with them in the Rhine valley. Everyone has the best intentions and is full of love, but they cannot keep from causing each other suffering as their complicated love story unfolds.
Catherine sounds like a handful, doesn’t she? And yet, I once knew a woman a lot like her. She was very beautiful and charismatic, loved whoever she wanted to whenever she wanted to for as long as she wanted to, and never gave a thought to how she might be living tomorrow; there would always, it seemed, be someone there to take care of her, give her whatever she needed, indulge whatever whim she might have. I have no trouble buying that such an arrangement might arise between a woman and a pair of of men in Europe between the wars. And such a story could be really pulpy and soapy (if something can be both pulpy and soapy) but Truffaut handles it all with a wonderful dry-eyed realism, with a sympathetic camera and journalistic editing style, letting the story speak for itself.
Imagine my surprise when I learned, elsewhere on the Criterion edition (where else?) that the movie is based on the true story of a clutch of real bohemians in the real Europe of 1914-34 (or so). After watching the thrilling, lyrical movie it’s great to watch the documentary included and hear the stories of the children of all these bohemians, who not only don’t have particularly bad memories of their parents’ unconventional lifestyles but actually mostly idolize them. If they critcise them, it’s for their innocence, not their morality.
Because morality is at the center of the story. In the movie, Jules and Jim and Catherine make up their own rules for living from day to day. Life, of course, imposes its own rules, as life will, and the conflict between the characters and the immutable laws of the universe forces a tragic end to their story. It’s sort of a metaphor for the whole belle epoch lifestyle, legislating its own morality until the Nazis come along with their own vision of morality, one enforced at gunpoint.
In real life however, Jules’s and Jim’s and Catherine’s lives don’t end in 1934. They all go on with their lives, raise children in various places around Europe, make livings in the margins of the literary world, have innumerable other affairs and complicated arrangements (Jim, for instance, after leaving Catherine and Jules, lived with three other women at once, promising to marry “whoever survived”), and live to ripe old ages (Catherine lived to be 96!). Truffaut says that these arrangements must have caused great turmoil and suffering, but his movie is full of joy and life (the tone of which is apparently taken from the novel). He didn’t make a cautionary tale, he made a love story.
Rolling Stones, Dodger Stadium 11/22/06
They can’t get no.
I can no longer say that I have not seen the Rolling Stones in concert.
Partly I was motivated to attend this show out of generational duty: I don’t want my grandchilden to one day say to me “What, you were on the planet at the same time as the Rolling Stones and you never went to see them?” Partly, I was curious as to how a group of multimillionaire sexagenarians (emphasis on sex, tee hee) could possibly get up on an enormous stage in a huge stadium in front of tens of thousands of people and play songs where they rail against the establishment, pine from unrequited love, celebrate substance abuse, loose women, serial murder and Satanic worship, and, of course, complain about a lack of satisfaction in their lives. What could such a show possibly mean?
Turns out, they sidestep the question of sincerity by their mere presence. Sure, they’re singing songs of sex and drugs and rock-n-roll written by twenty-five-year-olds, but they’re singing them here and now, old men, performing with the energy and enthusiasm of men half their age. They can’t possibly mean hedonist, sybarite songs like “Honky Tonk Women” or “Sympathy for the Devil” — what they’re celebrating is their ability to keep performing anything at all. But sweet hopping Jesus do they perform, and with great authority and abandon. More than once my wife cringed, worrying that Mick Jagger was bound to pop a knee joint or slip off the stage. There was not a trace of boredom, rote performance or forced bonhomie on stage. When Mick went into a wild, spastic dance that sent him jittering across the stage, it wasn’t “part of the act,” it was what he genuinely felt like doing at that moment. And we cheer and sing along not because we worship the devil or get crazy on drugs every night, but because we are inspired by the Stones’ refusal to stop playing.
And you know, they’re not just enthusiastic, they’re humble. The Stones weren’t just glad to be there tonight (Keith thanked his brain surgeon, who happened to be in the audience), they were genuinely humbled that so many people were nice enough to come out to see them. Mick would sing a song about getting high or a woman torturing him through her indifference and then say something to the audience like “What a nice group of people you are tonight.” They went through a terrific, drawn-out version of “Midnight Rambler” and right after Mick threatened to “stick a knife right down your throat,” he politely thanked the audience for their patience (the show got started late, after having been moved from Saturday because of Mick’s throat infection) and then actually apologized for the traffic. It kind of undercut the whole menacing-serial-killer vibe, but like I say, menace didn’t really seem to be the point of the show.
Even though they’re in a stadium, tiny figures on a gigantic stage, they perform as though they are in an intimate club playing for the hell of it. There is very little spectacle in the show and the emphasis is on music, the, god help me, subtle interplay of guitars and drums and band camaraderie. They blow notes, goof around, crash into each other. There’s nothing flashy on stage to distract from mistakes, the sound is sometimes muddy and there are no apologies made for fluffing. To solidify the “club” atmosphere there is a section of the show where the middle of the stage breaks off and moves slowly from center field to home plate, and suddenly the biggest band in the world is playing on a tiny stage in a sea of faces, careening around and grinning like idiots.
This evening they played two songs from their new record. Otherwise, there was nothing from after 1983 (“She Was Hot”) and very little from after 1974 (“It’s Only Rock n Roll”). That means 22 years of their discography was completely ignored, and yet they still found 20 or so terrific songs to play, not a dud in the bunch, and not to walk through but to genuinely play, play like they would honestly not rather be doing anything else at that moment.
Early on, Bonnie Raitt came out to sing a verse of “Dead Flowers” and I remember thinking “Gee, you know, if that was your only hit song, you’d still have a pretty impressive career,” but it was probably one of the least well-known songs of the evening. (“Dead Flowers” is also one of the few songs that sounds better as the singer gets older — when Mick was 30 he was being snide and ironic, now he sounds sincere and sadder-but-wiser.)
So, Mick might no longer feel as though he has been crowned with a spike right through his head, and he may no longer see a red door and want it painted black, and he may no longer feel that it’s absolutely necessary to call him the tumbling dice. But he and the others have found a way to keep playing those songs after 40 years and still make the performance mean something, even if the meaning is mainly in the act of performance itself. The songs celebrate bad behavior, loose morals and throwing one’s life away, but their performance celebrates perseverance, longevity and a life well-lived.
The Island
Scarlett: YOU! Ewan: Who, me?
WARNING: TOTAL MASSIVE SPOILERS
WHAT DOES BIG BROTHER WANT? Big Brother wants to provide wealthy people with the means to live longer.
WHAT DOES THE REBEL WANT? The rebel, as it happens, also wants to live longer. This is contrary to Big Brother’s plans.
WHAT DOES THE REBEL GET? This is a very expensive movie. The rebel must not merely succeed in achieving longer life; he must also free all the other oppressed people.
IS THERE AN UPPER CLASS IN THIS DYSTOPIA, AND DO THEY HAVE ANY FUN? There is and they do, which is kind of why the story exists in the first place.
DOES SOCIETY CHANGE AS A RESULT OF THE REBEL’S ACTIONS? Totally and unequivocably. Like I say, this is a very expensive movie; failure is not an option.
NOTES: There is much to recommend this movie, which in many regards is a hugely sophisticated piece of filmmaking. The production design is complex, sleek and elegant, the direction is fluid, unfussy and direct and the big action setpieces are flabbergasting. There’s an extended sequence in Act 2 that encompasses a footrace, a series of car crashes, a highway chase, flying motorcycles, an airborne helicopter pursuit through futuristic city streets, a dive through a skyscraper and a delirious plunge down the other side. The vision of the near-future is credible, unique and detailed. Loads of atmosphere. In Act 3 there’s some wonderful acting when Ewan McGregor meets himself. It’s short on character but stops short of becoming shallow.
It was also a notorious bomb last year (reported production budget: $126 million, domestic gross $36 million) and while there is a lot to like about it I can kind of see why it failed.
First there’s the title, which does not inspire excitement and which is says nothing about the movie. It would have been better to call it Clones on the Run, because it works pretty well on that level. Second, there’s something a little fuzzy about the concept, which I can’t discuss without spoiling the narrative, so read no further if you dislike having your movies spoiled.
Ewanand Scarlett are clones, raised in an underground clone city amid a whole big society of clones. None of the clones know they’re clones; they all think they’re survivors of a ruined planet and are lucky to have any life at all. This underground society of clones exists because they’re part of a business run by evil Dr. Merrick, who clones rich people for a lot of money so that they can have organs to replace theirs as they get older. When a rich person in the outer world becomes ill, their clone must be sacrificed. Dr. Merrick deals with this inevitability by inventing the contrivance of The Lottery, wherin, from time to time, a lucky clone will be selected to go to live on “The Island,” which is supposedly the last uncontaminated spot on the face of the Earth. Hence the title.
Ewan discovers one day that the world is, in fact, not ruined, and that the clones selected to go to “The Island” are, in fact, carved up like meat for their organs and tossed away. His gf Scarlett is scheduled to be sent to The Island that very afternoon, so he grabs her and the two of them escape out into the world, in order to seek their “sponsors” (ie the people they are clones of) and get some answers for why things are the way they are. This is all very upsetting to evil Dr. Merrick, because, see, in spite of all his money, it’s apparently illegal to create living, breathing, feeling, thinking human beings and then slaughter them.
Eventually Ewan and Scarlett get what they’re looking for, but that’s not good enough for Ewan, who decides in a rushed fourth act that it’s not good enough to merely get out of the underground clone city with his life and a sexy babe, he must also return to the underground clone city and free everyone who’s imprisoned there.
Here’s the problem as I see it:
Our society has no underground cities full of unjustly imprisoned clones yearning to breathe free. It’s not really a problem that needs to be addressed at the moment. There are no corporate giants creating clone societies and bending the rules about how those clones are raised. I can see that such a world might exist in the time frame that the movie is talking about, but it doesn’t exist now. And for some reason it’s hard to work up much feeling for the innocent clones because they actually have very pleasant lives where they live and eat and drink and dream and have jobs and clean clothes and good health. Yes, they’re raised for slaughter but they seem to be taken pretty good care of up to that point.
For a narrative like this to function, it seems to me, there must be a strong, easily identified metaphor at work. Clones as living, breathing spare-parts lockers doesn’t seem to be a metaphor for anything. You could make the argument that they represent the way the rich consider it the poor’s duty to cook their food, take care of their children, fight their wars and die so that they might get on with their fabulous lives, and that’s a very good point to make, but the movie doesn’t present the issue as one of a class war. It moves along at its swift, entertaining clip, showing us all the cool design, stunts and action it has in its bag, but doesn’t seem to stop to consider what it might actually be about.
There’s also the question of Dr. Merrick’s plan. According to the narrative, he tells people that the clones are merely organs and stuff in a vegetative state somewhere. But he has found that the organs fail if they’re not attached to an active brain. So instead of apologising to his clients and giving them their money back, he builds a gigantic underground clone society, complete with skyscraper-sized buildings, sophisticated holograph projections to convince the clones they’re in a magical paradise, a complicated backstory that has to be taught and reinforced at every turn, and a massive staff to take care of all this. Yet with this enormous construction project and the tens of thousands of workers it would take to build and maintain it, word has never gotten out that Dr. Merrick has perhaps bent the rules on the “vegetative clones” thing. That calls for extremely tight security, yet Ewan manages to climb up a ladder and into a forbidden level with no trouble at all.
Maybe the problem lies in the bifurcated nature of the movie. The first half is a sci-fi epic and the second half is an action epic, but once the Big Reveal has been revealed, the movie’s store of Big Ideas has been depleted and it must rely on adrenaline and heroics (both of which the director excels at) to get to the finish line. It seems that if you want to make a movie where It Turns Out They’re All Clones, that has to be the end of Act II (of three), not the end of the Act I (of four). (Another problem is that The Island has four distinct acts — the second two feel more like a sequel to the first two, not a continuation of it.)
Robert Altman
Well, I couldn’t let the day go by without mentioning the passing of Robert Altman.
He had a gigantic filmography with all kinds of stuff in it. 87 directing credits, including anonymous TV piecework, a decade’s worth of adaptations of American plays, some bizarre (and failed) experiments, some charming frippery, a few expensive studio misfires and probably twenty or so visionary masterpieces of American cinema.
If you’ve never see MASH, or only know the material from the insipid TV series, do yourself a favor and see the original. It will blow you away. It’s profane, hilarious, bloody, shocking, electrifying and defiantly frank in its depiction of the human condition.
Altman could be distressingly erratic but his successes were so definitive and inspiring that they always made up for his failures. You could sit through a dud as hapless as Beyond Therapy knowing that, sooner or later, he would come back with a superior entertainment like The Player or the flat-out masterpiece Gosford Park. Eclectic, prodigious and up for anything, his unpredictability made him relentlessly uncommercial but also gave him the most daringly alive career of any American director.
I am dismayed to find that I have only seen 17 of his movies: Countdown, MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, California Split, Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Popeye, Streamers, Fool for Love, Beyond Therapy, Aria, The Player, Short Cuts, The Gingerbread Man, Cookie’s Fortune, Gosford Park and The Company. As I peer over this list, I find six staggering masterpieces, one expensive, fascinating failed experiment, five worthwhile but lesser works, one atrocity and two mainstream studio pictures that could have been directed by anyone (both of which were, by the way, commercial failures). That would have been an entire career for most people but for Altman it’s barely a fifth of his output.
I also note that Altman’s breakthrough work, MASH, was released when he was 45 years old. 45 and he was just beginning! So there’s hope for me yet.
Truly Madly Deeply
Juliet Stevenson, sort of a British Laura Linney, is a woman whose cellist husband has died suddenly. Alan Rickman is the dead husband. It’s strange enough to see him playing a romantic lead; that he does so in a Village-People-style moustache is the mark of a truly daring actor.
Juliet misses Alan quite a bit, and so he obliges her by coming back and moving in with her. And things are nice, briefly, before he starts reminding her that he’s actually kind of a dick. He brings loads of dead guys around to watch videos all night, rearranges the furniture and continually picks at her manners and decorating choices.
Not a zombie movie per se, closer to a ghost story or a psychological drama, it’s about how we idealize the dead, how we remember them not as they were but as we like to think of them.
Another way to look at the story is that it’s as if Juliet and Alan are living their relationship in reverse. They start out intensely in love with each other but as time goes on they increasingly get on each others’ nerves as their personalities begin to clash. Juliet gets entangled in the lives of others and Alan starts to be more comfortable hanging out with the guys.
Mostly this is all well-observed and well-played. There are a few examples of twee British rom-com cuteness.
I have been told that it is one of the all-time great tear-jerkers. My tears remained unjerked, but then I was watching it primarily for its view on the walking dead. Your results may vary.
Director Anthony Minghella, Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson (with Kristen Scott-Thomas) would later examine a somewhat darker aspect of the love-after-death theme with their stunning, electrifying movie adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Play, which is available as part of the invaluable Beckett on Film set.
Pet Sematary Two
Edward Furlong has a cat. His friend has a dead dog. This is the start of a beautiful friendship.
In many ways, Pet Sematary Two is actually a better movie than Pet Sematary. It is better shot, better edited, better acted. Its production design and visual scheme is more coherent and consistent. That doesn’t make it The Bicycle Thief.
The problem, again, is the script, which actually manages to be less interesting than the first, even without Stephen King around to screw it up.
Edward Furlong’s mother, a Famous Actress, is dead and Edward would prefer she not be so.
As with Pet Sematary, the protagonist takes a Very Long Time to do anything about his problem. The mother dies in the very first scene and the movie takes an astounding 77 minutes (out of 100) to get around to addressing her death. Those 77 minutes are taken up with an assortment of subplots about Edward’s father (Anthony “I Can’t Believe I’m In This Movie” Edwards), his father’s new girlfriend, his father’s new veterinary practice, a kitten, a bully at school, his friend Drew, Drew’s relationship with his stepfather, Drew’s dead dog, Drew’s stepfather’s rabbits, a crazy ex-veterinarian, Drew’s stepfather’s relationship with Edward’s dead mother, Drew’s stepfather’s relationship with his (Drew’s) dead dog, and on and on. This means that the protagonist’s storyline actually takes up quite a bit less screen time than the subplots. It’s like the movie is really about Drew and is bookended by the protagonist’s story as an afterthought.
I give director Mary Lambert credit for actually having the nerve to throw in a number of visual references to DePalma’s Body Double and Kubrick’s The Shining. It’s as though she’s saying “Okay, I know I don’t have that kind of talent, but at least I can recognize that someone does, and I should get some credit for that, right?”
One question: Hollywood can gouge out an eye, chop off a head, set a person on fire and put a drill through any part of the body they choose, but why are they incapable of replicating a dead animal on screen? Without exception, what we see is: shot of a live animal, cut to a reaction shot from a human, then cut back to see a completely different animal, now dead, with completely different fur and seemingly now without bones. It happens four or five times in this movie, with dogs and cats and rats and rabbits. If you’re going to make a movie called Pet Sematary Two, spend a little money on your dead animals, people, please!
Pet Sematary
Hi. I’m Victor, and I’m here to fill a plothole.
I remember liking the novel Pet Sematary when it came out. It was twisted, sick and very, very disturbing. By the time came around to make a movie of the novel, Stephen King had acquired enough clout to write his own adaptation.
Big mistake.
Let’s go back to basics: who is the protagonist and what does he want?
The protagonist of Pet Sematary is Louis, played by Keanu-voiced actor Dale Midkiff. What does Louis want? Well, Louis’s toddler son Gage is dead and Louis would prefer that Gage not be dead. Great, no problem, excellent motivation. I want little Gage to not be dead too.
Problem is, little Gage doesn’t die until about halfway through the movie. The narrative just kills time up to that point, it paces back and forth, throws at us whatever it can come up with to try to keep us in a state of unease. Loud noises, mysterious lights, ominous music, a grotesque ghost, a suicidal housekeeper, a zombie cat, irrelevent dream-visions, pictures hung crooked, falling trees, a terminally ill sister, a psychic child, Herman Munster, the script just keeps chucking stuff at us, marking time until we’re practically screaming for the little kid to get creamed by the truck. Which he finally does.
Louis has moved his family to this small town in Maine. His neighbor from across the way is Herman Munster and large trucks barrel along the road at regular intervals.
That night, Louis is visited by Victor the Friendly Ghost With the Massive Head Wound. After spouting some opaque folk wisdom, Victor takes Louis to a mysterious burial ground and forbids him to ever set foot there. Good plan, Victor. Take a guy to a place he’s never been and forbid him to go there. That’s bound to stick. Hey, what are you doing in this movie, anyway? You don’t have any connection to this story. What are you, some kind of plot contrivance? Oh, you are? Oh well.
Louis’s daughter’s cat dies. Herman Munster says “Hey, you know what? I can take you to a mysterious ancient sacred burial ground and we can bury the cat there.” Louis says okay. Hey, is it the same mysterious ancient burial ground Victor the Friendly Ghost With the Massive Head Wound forbade me to set foot on? Because that would be totally cool. Let’s go.
Later, the cat comes back and is really pissed off (the cat remains so through the rest of the movie; I hate to think what they did to the poor cat to make it be pissed-off on cue). Herman Munster comes by and says “Oh yeah, well that’s what happens to animals when you bury them at the mysterious ancient burial ground. I should know, same thing happened to my dog.” Oh. Good. Hey Herman, if the same thing happened to your dog, why did you decide to tell Louis to bury his cat there? Perhaps it slipped your mind.
Anyway, Gage finally gets creamed by the truck and we’re supposed to care. I’m not sure why; I think we’re supposed to be concerned that this family has been torn asunder, but the fact is the actors don’t look like a family at all. There’s no sense that there is any love or tenderness or caring in this family. They look like they haven’t met each other before walking onto the set.
Herman Munster pulls Louis aside and says “I know what you’re thinking, young man. You’re thinking of taking your dead son to that mysterious ancient burial ground. Well let me tell you, that’s a bad idea. Guy tried that a while back and his son turned into a murderous zombie.” Okay, so you’ve had a reminder about the place since your dog died, tell me again why you suggested Louis bury his cat there? Who are you, anyway? Has anyone ever told you you’re a stupid old man? Because you are. You should just shut up and go inside and sit down and watch The Price is Right.
Anyway, Louis is not one to listen to reason, so when his wife and daughter leave town he goes and digs up his dead son and buries him again at the mysterious ancient burial ground. And at this point, I’m sorry, I have to ask: what, exactly, is Louis’s plan? I mean, let’s say everything goes according to plan and, all evidence to the contrary, little Gage bounds out of the grave fresh-faced and giggling. Then what? What are you going to do with your fresh-faced zombie son? How exactly are you going to explain to people that your dead son, who they saw you bury, is not, in fact, dead any longer? How do you suppose they are going to react to this news? And it’s not like Louis has no time to consider any of this. I mean, it takes a long time to dig up a grave, haul out the body, carry it across town, haul it across a wide expanse of countryside and bury it again. There’s plenty of time in there to think about exactly how this is all going to play out.
Meanwhile, Herman Munster muses on his front porch. He knows he’s done wrong, he’s a foolish old man and it’s time to face facts. “You did this, Herman Munster,” he says, “And now you’ve got to undo it.” Filled with raging fires of resolve, he promptly falls asleep.
Louis knows how he feels. After digging up his son, carting him across hill and dale and burying him again, he goes home, plops down on the bed and also falls asleep. Because you know? After you’ve buried your son for the second time in a week and you know he’s going to show up in the morning as a zombie toddler, you know the best idea is to catch some z’s because the morning might be a little crazy.
Anyway, while Louis is burying the kid his daughter in Chicago has a dream, because any time Stephen King needs a plot fixed he tosses in a kid with psychic powers, and the wife is sent back home to try to stop Louis in his madness, and Victor the Friendly Ghost With the Massive Head Wound carefully, patiently guides the wife back to the house so she can, after much effort, get killed by little zombie Gage, just like Scatman Crothers in The Shining. Thanks for showing up Vic, big help, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
The acting is awful, the production design is somehow simultaneously both cheap and overwrought, there is no visual scheme to speak of and no genuine scares. The zombie toddler, who is apparently capable of hauling dead bodies up steep staircases, fails to haunt one’s dreams.
Bond, James Bond
As the world rushes out to luxuriate in the warm, churning waters Casino Royale ($40 million gross, almost enough to beat the dancing penguins), I find myself feeling like a Jew at Christmas. There is a celebration going on all around and I can’t quite figure out what it has to do with me.
For some reason I’ve never “gotten” James Bond. I’ve tried, I really have.
Maybe I’m the wrong age. I remember seeing Goldfinger on TV when I was a kid, and enjoying it because my brothers and father liked it, and I liked the assassin with the killer hat and the fact that the bomb that Bond is chained to is shut off at 007 seconds. But the first one I saw in the theaters was Moonraker when I was 17, and that put me off Bond until Goldeneye. Bond just always seemed to be part of someone else’s mythology.
(Sensing a lack in my understanding of my cultural heritage, a few years ago I sat down to watch all of them, including the ridiculous ’67 Casino Royale and ’83’s Never Say Never Again. I also started in on the books, but got through only three of them before giving up.)
Even from a young age, I could see that the Bond pictures are not dramas or even thrillers; they are pageants, as predictable and unchanging as the Passion Play. Bond is an unflappable guy who dresses well, drives cool cars, kills men, sleeps with women, blows stuff up and moves on. There is nothing at stake, no emotional involvement, no chance of development. The movies aren’t about character and they’re not even really about politics or the nature of espionage. Bond doesn’t love, hate or care about anything but, apparently, appearances. No one can ever remember the plot of a Bond movie because the plot is the least important aspect of it.
(In Goldfinger, the best-loved movie of the series, Bond wanders through the whole movie without having an iota of impact on the plot. He sneaks around, witnesses things and puts together a puzzle, stands around and watches things happen. He instigates no course of action and can’t even defuse an atom bomb when he’s chained to one — that job falls to a CIA guy who happens by at the right moment. He doesn’t even kill Oddjob; Oddjob kills himself. He can barely even take credit for offing Goldfinger himself; a stray bullet takes care of that.)
What’s important in the Bond movies is style. What does he wear, what kind of car does he drive, who are the women he sleeps with, how does he kill men and chase people and destroy property, what deformity or perversion does the bad guy have, and is it all carried off with panache?
I think Bond is purposefully not a character at all but rather a deliberately empty suit, a model in the fashion sense, designed only to wear things, to be an attractive cipher, to better sell us things. Specifically, he is designed to sell men an idea of how they are supposed to behave. In spite of most of us never having the chance or opportunity to legally kill men, sleep with superficially gorgeous women without consequence, blow stuff up or drive our cars over the speed limit, we are expected to turn to James Bond for lessons in, in, in something, I’m not sure what. Self-reliance? Charisma? Brutality? Grace under pressure?
There is, of course, an important capitalist element to the Bond pictures, and it’s not just about his brand of watch. (Woman in the new Casino Royale: Nice watch. Rolex? Bond: Omega. Woman: Beautiful.) Bond is a brand unto himself, and “the new Bond” is always a kind of barometer of western culture. If we can put together a better Bond, it seems, no matter how the political winds of the world are blowing, the capitalist machine is still operating well enough. We parade the new Bond as proudly as the Russians once paraded their rows of ICBMs on Mayday. They were advertising their militaristic might, we were (and still are) advertising our easy living, loose morals and conspicuous consumption.
There is a kind of world-wide anxiety about Bond. Every time a new actor is announced, people everywhere get very concerned about the health of the franchise. Is Bond going to be okay? Why isn’t the studio making more Bond pictures? Are they going to keep on making them? Is he still relevant? Was he ever? Is he tough enough, too tough, too funny, too male, too emasculated, too brutal, too ironic? Too blond? He seems to be really important to people, to men anyway. (Thinking of the capitalist perogative, maybe one of the reasons Bond has been so successful for so long is because the West needs to celebrate, above all, its power to be superficial, stupid and wasteful. They’re like capitalist pornography.)
In any case, each time a new one comes along I find myself getting swept up in it because I’m in the business and I keep thinking maybe there’s something there. With the new one, for instance, it has been mentioned that Bond has been reinvented in order to compete with Jason Bourne at the cineplex. I love love love the Bourne movies and so does my wife (Me: You want to leave me and marry Matt Damon, don’t you? Wife: No, not Matt Damon, Jason Bourne), so the prospect of Bond being toughened up in the Bourne sense sounded like a good idea to me.
Perhaps that’s where the seed of my disappointment in the new movie lies. This Bond is still dressed in a tux, still plays games of leisure in the playgrounds of the wealthy, still lives the high life, trading superficial quips while driving fancy cars with beautiful women, and still has a cheesy, eye-rollingly stupid title sequence. (There is some commentary this time around about how this Bond is closer to Ian Fleming’s original conception of the character, as if that meant anything, as if we were discussing freaking Hamlet here instead of a coat hanger with a gun.) We are told that this time the woman means something, but we know that’s not true, because if the woman meant something she would stick around for another movie and we know that’s not going to happen because that would be antithetical to the whole Bond thing. Bond doesn’t change, Bond can’t change. Bond doesn’t fall in love, Bond moves on, like a shark, leaving destruction and broken hearts in his path. The Bond movies keep promising thrills but keep delivering only spectacle.
As the movie and series continues to prove itself wildly popular, I welcome education as to why this is so.