Andy Sharp's THE ENGLISH HERETIC COLLECTION: RITUAL HISTORIES, MAGICKAL GEOGRAPHY

Can we use film geographies to create cultural maps across a slice of time?

A long, long time ago when I first became concerned that all I ever seemed to read or watch was fiction, I made a particular effort to start adding more non-fiction to my cultural diet, went to the University of Wyoming's Coe Library (from which you could check out any number of books for a whole semester), and grabbed a big stack of stuff. One of which was Simon Schama's then-brand-new Landscape and Memory, a book that in many ways changed my life. Among other things, it led me to concoct, sometime later, one of my odder blog posts about how I personally had imagined the landmarks and locations of The Lord of the Rings when I was a kid.

Landscape and Memory is just that kind of read. But it's one that is almost sui generis; it wasn't until I discovered* W.G.Sebald and especially Rings of Saturn that I found anything to compare. 

Now I've found a third such project, a book that sums up a unique artist's strange and fascinating and definitely Ballardian (he even references Simon Sellars!**) oeuvre, English Heretic. A project that seems to have been aimed specifically at my little head but about which I'd been totally unaware until somehow I learned about Andy Sharp and The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography.***

Imagined in direct opposition to English Heritage and all it stands for, Andy Sharp describes his English Heretic project as a way to "use place as a means of fecundating the imagination." The resulting book is a survey of decades' worth of incredible creativity and energy, rendered in very serviceable prose, with lots of astonishing little insights popping up like graveyard ghouls from a cemetery that's older than my entire country.

As the quote I used to start this post indicates, a lot of Sharp's work begins and ends with film locations and sets, especially those appearing in the low-budget esoterica of the 1970s folk horror masterpieces he loves (many of which can be enjoyed via YouTube or Tubi as of this writing), like Witchfinder General or The Blood on Satan's Claw or The Shout or The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. I have seen precisely none of these films, but I'm looking forward to doing something about that soon. Judging from the trailers, I'm in for a pretty good time!

Anyway, a discussion of the latter film yields exceptional fun: The filming of Living Dead took place partly at a somewhat famous church, Hathersage in Derbyshire, and was interrupted by a coach load of tourists who "on witnessing the zombie orgies informed the authorities." The film crew had been working and camping it there for three days without official permission, of course. By the way:

The tourist party had come to Hathersage to view Little John's grave which takes up seven feet of the burial ground. Little John is the church's most famous inhabitant. I'd like to imagine Little John's reanimated corpse joining forces with Guthrie**** and his undead merry men to reap anthropophagic revenge on the do-gooding snitchers of Hathersage.

Sharp goes on to connect elements of the film's plot with actual local folklore, but leaves us to speculate whether the filmmakers were consciously aware of that folklore when making the movie. I mean, it's way more fun that way, right?

One location I can't believe Sharp didn't write about in any of these projects of his, is Winspit Quarry, though. You may think you don't know this place, but, friends, if you've ever watched much of the original Doctor Who series, you've likely spent rather a lot of time looking at it: it's that quarry Privately owned but publicly accessible at your own risk, this has to be one of the most haunted locations on the Sceptered Isle. It's stood in for so many alien planets, you guys. The psychic ghosts of so many rubber-bodied aliens are stalking it. And it's not like Andy Sharp doesn't know his Doctor Who or his Blake's Seven or anything. But maybe this is simply too famous a location for him.

Sharp isn't only concerned with films, though; another major cultural touchstone for this work is most of my very favorite psychologist, James Hillman's, later works after he developed his "acorn" theory of personality development, which I first encountered in a book he collaborated on with Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotheraphy and the World is Getting Worse.***** The personality at its youngest and least developed is Hillman's acorn, which is tiny and nut-shaped but contains within it the potential to grow into a vast and branching oak tree; as it becomes a sapling it develops "nubs" which Hillman views as behavioral and obsessional interests that hint at the personality's mature form, destiny and role in the world. Sometimes, as with, say, Winston Churchill, Hillman sees these nubs in a kind of negative, as when he considers Churchill's childhood stammer as a kind of fear or intimidation of the promptings his soul was giving him that prefigured that one day he would have to save the world by his speech. I believe Hillman went further with this notion in a book of his that I still haven't read but which turned out to be his most popular, The Soul's Code.

Anyway, Sharp calls on Hillman and his acorn theory as he contemplates personalities as diverse as Aleister Crowley, J.G. Ballard and Max Ernst, all viewed through the lens of place. He particularly goes to town on Ballard, whose fractally fascinating life as a child in a Japanese prison camp, an avant-garde writer of incredible science fiction short stories and a single father who only really got weird with it after his wife's untimely death left him raising four children a stone's throw away from a major film studio.

Of course Sharp is most interested in Crash, though The Unlimited Dream Company and The Atrocity Exhibition get plenty of attention, too. But it's Crash and its unforgettable character of Vaughan who really haunts English Heretic, as a fictional subject of Sharp's "Black Plaque" project, again, in direct mockery of English Heretic's plaques concerning the doings of various celebrated English people in various English places.

Sharp likes the nastier sort of person, of course. Don't we all?

At the rate I'm going, all but homebound on the high plains of the western U.S., I'm never going to get to visit the U.K., will never see any of these places with my own failing eyes. Thank Yog that people like Andy Sharp and Simon Schama are writing the next best thing to being there, books like English Heretic.

*Thanks to my late, lamented friend Lethe Bashar, aka Chris al-Aswad.

**IYKYK

***And no, I don't remember how I found out about this book, and it's driving me crazy. I've interrogated my usual suspects and nobody's owning up. So maybe Andy Sharp has just been beaming this book at my bean since 2020 and my skull is just too thick -- I do famously have incredibly dense bones, like freaking Wolverine -- to have admitted the signal right away. Or something.

****Guthrie played a drowning victim who spends the film as a soaking wet "submarine zombie."

***** A book which I cannot recommend highly enough, old as it is. Hillman and Ventura bounce off each other beautifully, and pushed each other into a lot of wild ideas that the rest of our culture is still catching up with.

Clifford Irving's FAKE! THE STORY OF ELMYR DE HORY, THE GREATEST ART FORGER OF OUR TIME

I dearly love a hoaxer, and Fake: The Story of Elmyr de Hory, The Greatest Art Forger of Our Time, Clifford Irving's I-think-mostly-true biography of the Hungarian painter Elmyr de Hory who probably at one time had more of his art in the museums and tony private collections of the world than any other artist (just, you know, not under his own name), is part of a veritable matryoshka of fakery, flim-flam, and fabulosity the likes of which we'll never see again.

Technology may someday allow someone to achieve what Elmyr did materially -- there may already exist an algorithm that can create the perfect fake Matisse, Renoir, Picasso, etc and do in seconds what took Elmyr minutes todo -- but no one will ever duplicate anything like Elmyr's actual career, and that of his two ridiculous (and ridiculously awesome) partners in crime, Fernand Legros and Real Lessard.

I might once have thought I'd learned everything I needed to know about Elmyr from Orson Welles' amazing sui-generis sort-of-documentary F for Fake, which not only tells a good chunk of Elmyr's story but that of his biographer, Clifford Irving, as well* and lets Welles indulge in the art a bit himself. Which is to say that here's where the matryoshka comes in. Here, just have a look at the trailer for the film:


But had I left it at that, my loving study of Elmyr, I would have missed out on the real joke of it all, which is that the great forger was himself kind of a patsy. For, well, let us just say that Legros and Lessard saw Elmyr coming, a goose laying golden gouaches and drawings and paintings, and penned him up and kept him hungry so he'd keep doing that while they made a fortune off his work, and lived in high, hissy-fit throwing style, as globetrotting art dealers to the well-heeled and the gullible.

It's all terribly, terribly entertaining. But really, none of it would be possible had not Elmyr really been that good, so good that one time when one of his forgeries was brought before the artist whose work it purported to be, the artist claimed to remember having painted it! Well, at least, according to legend...

Another way this book is fascinating to the 21st century reader is the extraordinary time capsule of lost freedoms it provides. Elmyr's and Legros' and Lessard's escapades would be impossible in our modern, globalized, internet-connected world. They traveled across mid-century Europe and the Americas at speeds faster than anyone but science fiction writers could have dreamed information would, one day. Found out, or in danger of being so, in one city/nation/continent/time zone, they could trip gaily across international borders with their easily forged passports, never having to remove their shoes, long before their victims could even begin to figure out who to tell. Not that too many of their victims caught on before the story finally broke in the early 70s. Not when the forgery of customs stamps and "expertises" certifying the genuineness of the work were so easy to create and come by. Not when the story of how that beautiful Derain came to be for sale sounded so wonderfully plausible -- a Hungarian aristocrat escaped from the Nazis with a small part of his family's art collection and is now selling it off in pieces to stay alive! How romantic! How wonderful! Why, you're almost a part of art history yourself in buying it from him!

Of course, Elmyr's buyer-victims have become part of art history, as some recognized right away when the scandal broke. One man who had been considering buying one when the news became public insisted to his surprised dealer on buying it any way, on condition that the dealer certify that it was a genuine Elmyr forgery.

Loving the man as I do, I, too, would love to have a genuine Elmyr forgery, but I would demand a provenance of how it came to be sold, by what chain of crooks and puffed-up authenticators and dealers and museum "experts" it had come to me. I would want to know who all it fooled, and which of Elmyr's partners in crime put it on the market. Alas, I'm priced out of the market for those, as we learn in Clifford Irving's author's postscript, in which he reveals that much of his knowledge of Elmyr's doings came first-hand; Irving lived on the Spanish island of Ibiza where Legros and Lessard kept Elmyr in luxurious semi-bondage, and was Elmyr's friend right up until Elmyr saw the page proofs of Fake! and disliked, not the admiring tone, not the all but hagiographical charm of the work, but the fact that he, Elmyr, was being admired as a successful crook.

No pleasing some people.

But I, I am very pleased.

*Who, it seems, was so inspired by his experience writing this biography -- and knowing Elmyr personally long before the biography project was hatched -- that he later perpetuated a famous hoax of his own, a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. I include this note mostly for those of you who are too lazy to watch that nine minute film trailer I've embedded above. But really, you should watch it. It's its own little work of art.

Netflix Finds: Bela Tarr's THE WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES

Hungarian filmmaker BélaTarr has made something altogether wonderful in The Werckmeister Harmonies, a film in which a lot is going on but still doesn't have a lot of plot, a film which is meant to be watched and listened to and absorbed and yes, probably argued about, but not necessarily enjoyed for the narrative.

I would undersell it to describe it as a two and a half hour music video, but in some ways that's what it is, and what the title might almost make one expect; the work of Baroque era composer and musical theorist Andreas Werckmesiter is alluded to (negatively) but is not present in the soundtrack, replaced by Strauss' Radetzsky March, Bach's Prelude No. 8 in E-flat minor from The Well Tempered Clavier and, most importantly and thoroughly, a gloriously beautiful and haunting score by Hungarian composer Vig Mihaly, in which a simple and repetitive piano motif is amplified, possibly canonically (I'm no music theorist myself) by beautiful string arrangements that alternately meditate and weep and amplify the film's stateliness (if the film grabs you) or glacial slowness (which you'll complain of if it doesn't).

What story there is concerns a tiny village on the Hungarian plain, the kind that seems suspended in a strange 20th century timelessness until the spell is broken toward the end with the brief appearance of a modern helicopter in a vaguely (and slowed down) North by Northwest-ish chase scene. It's winter, or the start of winter, and the mercury has dropped to way below freezing; the season of "nothing to do but drink and fret" has begun. To liven things up of an evening, our sort-of-hero, Valuska János (Lars Rudolph) takes it upon himself to arrange the drunks in the town's only cafe into a living, staggering orrery to explain an upcoming eclipse (which, violating Chekov's gun rules, does not occur in the film except maybe in a very metaphorical sense).

But soon more interesting entertainments are on offer: a traveling circus! Tarr both does and does not partake of the "sinister carnival" motif we see so often in film with this: the circus consists of just two "acts": a taxidermy whale and a nasty non-character called "The Prince", alluded to but never seen, who allegedly has the "power of magnetism" but seems principally to exercise that power in the form of hate speech that has startlingly violent consequences.

All of this unfolds in 39 long and languid shots, sometimes several minutes long, that will either madden or entrance the viewer. The taxidermy whale arrives slowly in a giant corrugated metal crate and we watch its ponderous arrival in real time with János as the light ripples along the crate's surface. János puts one "uncle" to bed and prepares his house for nighttime, then goes out on a newspaper delivery "run" that's really more of a stroll. He pauses with another "uncle" (I think maybe "uncle" is an honorific for your elders in Hungary?) who expounds on his theories that Andreas Werckmeister's tuning theories have distorted the Music of the Spheres (which idea János sort of demonstrated in the cafe) and are why everything has gone wrong in the world. He meets with the theorist's estranged wife (Hanna Shygulla), who insists on János drafting the old man into doing something about the growing disturbance in the town the circus has touched off. A group of cudgel brandishing men slowly march to the facility they will do their best to destroy. Etc.

Really, for me, it's all about watching the light play on Shygulla's beautifully aging features, on the shadows and hollows created in Rudolph's face, and the rhythm of the film's dancelike movements to Vig Mihaly's amazing, amazing score.

Netflix Finds: Erik Eger & Magnus Oliv's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF EVIL

I like a mockumentary almost as much as I like a documentary, especially when it's got lots of layers of complete WTFery. So I'm pretty much exactly the audience for something like Erik Eger & Magnus Oliv's One Hundred Years of Evil, which concerns itself with a (fictitious) researcher and documentary filmmaker's pursuit of proof that Adolf Hitler not only survived World War II but came to America and continued to mastermind evil in his adopted homeland.

The fun starts right in the opening credits, where we keep seeing an improbable yet euphonious name over and over again: Idelfonso Elizade, named as the auteur but not, it turns out, an actual person. But soon we're immersed in stranger things as our researcher character, Skule (quoth my roommate "Dude, I wish I had a name as cool as Skull") starts unearthing secret after secret, his discoveries and interviews intercut with "found footage" in which, for instance, our maybe-Hitler sitteth on the (camera) right hand of Joseph McCarthy almighty, bobbing his head right along with everybody's favorite Red Scare menace as he lectures about the insidious threat of Communism in post-war Amurrka or makes a brief and totally deadpan stage appearance with a troupe of transsexual singers for whom he served as a roadie for a while.

Meanwhile, Skule starts getting harassed by unseen forces eager to keep the truth hidden and starts getting entertainingly paranoid in an almost Blair Witchian fashion. And the hilarity continues. My roommate and I laughed our asses off. You might, too.

If I have a criticism, it is only this: too many of the performances were a little too on the nose, spoiling the illusion that this actually was a documentary. No one ever made the amateur mistakes of looking into the camera, no one ever stumbled or paused in delivering their lines, it was all just a little too perfect, and thus obvious that these were actors playing crazy sources and not just crazy sources. But perhaps that, too, was intentional, a further sending up of the documentary format and its conventions? I'm just not sure.

100 Books #106 - David Mitchell's CLOUD ATLAS (with thoughts on the film)

My experience with Cloud Atlas, book and film, has been a most unusual one. Pretty much always, if a book in one of my general areas of interest attracts enough attention to be actually greenlit and made into a film, I won't go near said film until I've read the book, which is always better than the film (even though I love film). I figured this case would be no different, so when previews for this film started showing up before all the big dumb superhero movies and whatnot this summer, I took notice, recalling that some of my friends had recommended this book to me and that I'd decided it sounded interesting enough to get hold of and read someday.

Then the film announcement and PANIC! Not much time to read the book, aaaaaah! But I was reading all of these other books (seriously, the number of books I'm reading at any given time is truly absurd). But surely I could fit this one in. So I started it.

And it kind of fizzled on me. I read the first section -- half-baked Joseph Conrad, lots of White Man's Burden -- and slowly propelled myself on sheer inertia into the second... and then Angry Robot dropped some new books and Candlemark & Gleam dropped one I was OMG excited for (that would be Mr. Blank) and I got an eARC of something else I was excited for (Fridgularity) and the Humble Bundle came out and...

BOOM! Theatrical release. And early buzz on the film was decidedly mixed. I quickly discovered that most of the haters, though, were hating on the controversial make-up jobs; to convey the continuity of characters/souls/whatever over time (this is, at least in part, a reincarnation story, after all), some big-time make-up work was required to, e.g., make white actors look Asian, black actors look white or Asian, etc. It got to be a whole thing. As things do.

But that's all beside the point, for me. Which is not to say that I don't get or feel with the people who were complaining about the makeup (which was also very distracting, perhaps even more so than that done on Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Looper), just that, to me, it seems that doing what the directors did with these actors helped ground the film's reality in a way that casting racially correct actors wouldn't. And really? Cloud Atlas, the movie, needed plenty of grounding, because it, and the novel it adapted, are nothing like what audiences are used to getting from a big budget film like this.

Both film and book offer a spectacular array and variety of storytelling. There is a 19th century high seas adventure full of perfidy and plotting (that would be the aforementioned half-baked Conrad), a High Romantic tale of forbidden love and musical composition on the eve of WWII, a 1970s conspiracy thriller (even in the novel, this part of the story felt like an action movie), a contemporary senior citizen's nightmare riff on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a dystopian high tech sci fi tale of clones and revolution, and a post-apocalyptic last grab at redemption for humanity that features the remnants of a high tech civilization collaborating with a tribe of aboriginal types who survived the apocalypse only because they were never part of the high tech world to begin with. Which is to say that there is very likely something for everyone.

But I didn't get that feel at all when I started the book! In both book and film, the stories are broken into chunks and intercut with one another, but the book has bigger chunks and fewer cuts. Ordinarily, this would argue for the book's being a richer and more comprehensive experience, but in this case, the film's three directors (Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Twyker) and the editor (Alexander Bener, whom I think needs to get an Oscar for his work) broke the stories into much smaller chunks, did a great deal more intercutting even from the very first, and did not respect the novel's chronology all that much -- and in so doing conveyed the novel's point* better than the novel did.

That's right. Chopping up the story/stories and remixing them like some kid from Pirate Cinema actually made it all make more sense. And rekindled my interest in the book. Hell, rekindled isn't the term -- more like ignited. Because I knew that, even though the film is longish by mainstream cinema standards, it probably wasn't totally serving all of the stories as well as one might like (I'd love to find out that a gigantic directors' cut DVD is in the works because that would be one to own). I especially suspected that there was more going on in the high tech sci-fi story, in which a Neo-Seoul, Korea, is ruled by a "corpocracy" than the film touched on.

And I was right.

Am I conveying that there's a hell of a lot going on in this novel? Because there is. At bottom, these six interlinked stories ask all kinds of difficult questions about how we treat one another as human beings, questions about slavery and freedom, respect for the individual and his/her right to self-determination, what civilization is, even how we might define what constitutes a human being. These are chiefly explored through the lens of slavery and related forms of coercion: the first story deals with the historical institution as we all remember it; the second with the horrors of an attempt to transform willing servitude/apprenticeship into slavery via blackmail; the third shifts gears to examine how a free society can be enslaved and endangered by corporate interests eager to feed the hunger for more ever more energy and stuff; the fourth examines the plight of an old man tricked into a retirement home whose residents are essentially prisoners; the fifth brings it all together in the story of a clone designed for a life of food service drudgery, engineered and conditioned to believe it's a wonderful life but awakening to its actual horrors -- she is a sentient being who is the property of a corporation and her every waking and sleeping moment is under its control, until suddenly it's not***; and the last story shows us the potential consequences of all of these elements and impulses run mad: a devastated environment, a loss of civilization, a return to life that is nasty, brutish and short, in which a character from the first story's credo that "the weak are meat the strong do eat" becomes literal.

The stories are interwoven most cunningly, for these are not merely sequential episodes. Ideas and images from one story echo in others** and some elements from "earlier" bits only really make sense after one has gotten to later ones (lots of nice "aha" moments). The feeling that it's all quite profound is, I think, earned.

But I genuinely think that I would not have enjoyed this book as much had I not read it concurrently with the film. The novel tells a great story/set of stories; the film tells it better, but in doing so has to leave out a lot of bits that make the novel a richer version of the story. They complement each other beautifully.

But really, I would have probably dropped this novel unfinished had the timing of events not produced their sequence in my personal life as they did.

*At least as I understand it.

**Naturally, the visual motifs are more apparent in the film, and some more are added (I think chiefly of the sapphire buttons from the first story and how they keep turning up), to elegant effect.

***The film pulls the most cynical/subversive punch from this story, which shouldn't surprise anyone, really; in general, the film versions of the stories have some teeth pulled and are given rather happier endings than they have in the book.

100 Books #99 - Stanislaw Lem's SOLARIS

I was absolutely charmed by my first Stanislaw Lem book, The Cyberiad, but this one, this one is very different. I am haunted by it, as I am by J.G. Ballard's books -- but even more so.

Just pages into Solaris, I could see why the amazing Andrei Tarkovsky picked on it to adapt into a film.* Not because its plot or characters are demanding to make the leap to the big screen, but because its setting, as observed by Kris Kelvin, is sense-swampingly cinematic:

"...as though sucked upwards, the cloud-mass lifted; I was gliding, half in light, half in shadow, the capsule revolving upon its own vertical axis..."

"...the sun's orbit, which had so far encircled me, shifted unexpectedly, and the incandescent disc appeared now to the right, now to the left, seeming to dance on the planet's horizon. I was swinging like a giant pendulum while the plaenet, its surface wrinkled with purplish-blue and black furrows, rose up in front of me like a wall."

And that's just the English translation. Goodness knows what the appeal of the original Polish to the mind's eye would be. I'm guessing marvelous, because Polish seems marvelous. But so, who wouldn't want to try to bring such images (and these aren't even the most vivid or colorful. There's a freaking literary light show towards the end!) to the actual eye, hmm?

Alas, the films, both Tarkovsky's glorious one and Stephen Soderberg's somewhat less-so one, are more interested in Kelvin and the strange clone/doppelganger/thing of his wife that shows up just as other figures, imaginary/archetypal or real, show up in the lives of the others on the station studying the planet Solaris, than in Solaris itself. This is not true of the book.

Solaris is alive, or at least its surface is, taken up by one vast organism that defies biological, chemical, and physical science but exists anyway. It delights in creating vast structures and shapes from its own imagination and, ominously, in creating slightly off copies of human objects. And memories? Well, how else do you think these imperfect copies of people and creatures who are haunting the researchers get there?

But get this. Oh, get this. As Kelvin reads a prior researcher's account of his observations on Solaris, we get a sense of vast weirdness that I have only ever encountered in one book (Greg Bear's Blood Music), though perhaps there are echoes of this in Alastair Reynolds' Pattern Jugglers as well (though they are many organisms on many water-covered planets, not one vast one that only sort of seems like an ocean. Anyway, check this description of one of many weird types of oceanic/organic formations the researchers call "Extensors" doing their weird things under the light of the planet's two suns (a red one and a blue one):

"It must be understood that the 'extensors' are formations that dwarf the Grand  Canyon, that they are produced in a substance which externally resembles a yeasty colloid (during this fantastic 'fermentation' the yeast sets into festoons of starched open-work lace; some experts refer to 'ossified tumors'), and that deeper down the substance becomes increasingly resistant, like a tensed muscle which fifty feet below the surface is as hard as rock but retains its flexibility. The 'extensor' appears to be an independent creation, stretching for miles between membranous walls swollen with 'ossified growths' like some colossal python which after swallowing a mountain is sluggishly digesting the meal, while a slow shudder occasionally ripples along its creeping body."

It goes on at greater length, but that bit should be enough to convey the awesome creepiness of the planet Solaris. I had chills. Even before we learn that when seen up close this structure is "bewilderingly alive with movement." Its hard not to imagine the continent-spanning waves of sentient individual cells that engulf North America in Blood Music -- but Solaris came first, of course.

And Solaris, Solaris is real science fiction. As in there is lots of science, the way science is actually conducted. And no, I'm not talking about crazy experiments, though there are some of those. I'm talking about all of the literature reviews our narrator conducts in the course of telling  his story (the big block quote above comes from a journal article). As any former or current graduate student/coolie can tell you, a vastly greater amount of a working scientist's time is so spent than anyone who is not one or hasn't been one would suspect -- especially in a well-established discipline, which, at the time of the events of this novel "Solarist studies" is. There are decades of theories, counter-theories, grant proposals, experimental "results", project budgets and other documentary minutiae to be gone through if one is going even try to grasp the immensity of the planet/life form's mystery. It's a true testament to Lem's storytelling abilities that this is not at all tedious. I, for one, kind of felt myself tapping my foot impatiently through all of the Kelvin/Pseudo-Mrs. Kelvin scenes, waiting to learn more about the planet.** Or, at least, about what it probably wasn't.


"The existence of the thinking colossus was bound to go on haunting men's minds."

Yep.


*I'm trying not to gush too much about this film -- and it is not a perfect film; feel free to fast forward through its infamously dull "city of the future" scene, in which characters are sitting in a car and traveling a seemingly endless expanse of then-contemporary Tokyo, for instance; it's there because Tarkovsky was damned lucky to get to leave the Soviet Union to go get that footage, and he had to justify the trip, by not-god -- but if you haven't seen it or aren't willing to give it a chance, I... I just don't know what to say. It's an amazing and subtle film, and features one of my very favorite actors, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, in a strong supporting role. It concerns itself more with the relationship between Kelvin and his dead wife than with all of the real science fiction, which now that I've read the novel I find a bit of a cheat, but my jaw still just drops at the mere thought of this film.

**Again, how much of this is due to having enjoyed (Tarkovsky) and endured (Soderberg) two film adaptations that were all Rheya/Hari (for reasons I do not grasp, Kelvin's wife is named Hari in the original Polish novel and the Tarkovsky film, and Rheya in the English translation and Soderberg's film), all the time, I cannot say. And how much of that is due to Natascha McElhone, whose performance in Soderberg's version I loathed, well, maybe that I can say, because I heard every line of Rheya's dialogue in the book in her whiny/whispy voice until I wanted to find a way to claw out that part of the brain that is the mind's ear.

100 Books #83 - Jeff Gordinier's X SAVES THE WORLD

My best friend from college and I were just across the Hudson River from Saugerties, NY the weekend of Woodstock '94, snarling and sneering the whole time at what we'd been very, very sure was going to be a mountain of suck, the Baby Boomer Generation having yet another stab at putting us in our place. We passed around a cartoon that his co-worker had drawn of what Woodstock '94 should really be like: mohawked punk stick figures stomping hippies into the ground, black helicopters spraying machine gun fire, a mushroom cloud detonating on the horizon. It gave us even greater satisfaction than the news that came over local and national media as that foolish weekend wore on that it was exactly the giant corporate suckfest we'd figured it would be, that we were right.

The first third or so of Jeff Gorinier's book is a lot like that, a litany of memories and realities that fueled a bitterness that I had kind of forgotten I'd had.* And for that reason I almost put it aside, despite the recommendations of someone for whom I have more respect than just about anyone on the internet, the blogger who tweets as TamaranOrBust, who has quite an inspiring and interesting post on this topic (actually a series of posts, but the one I link to here is possibly her finest).

Man, am I glad I stuck with this book, though. For the rest of it is an eye-opening, bumptious, raucous, giddy celebration of what we have done while being ignored and what we might still have in us to do. I poured a glass of wine, cranked up a '90s alternative music "station" on Slacker Radio, and smiled my way through the rest of it.

I've been hearing bits here and there of late about how it's time my generation (born in 1970, I'm an Xer by pretty much every measure anyone has suggested) came out of hiding and started taking another stab at keeping what we care about alive in this world: authentic culture, new and old; the right to live a life on the margins without giving up having a say in matters (the analogy of hypermodern chess comes to mind); the right not to be Boomers or Millennials eagerly participating uncritically in a hive mind serving interests that really aren't our own.

But rather than a call to arms or a lecture about the need to start new causes or take on the Boomers who, let's face it, aren't ever going to let go of their economic and cultural dominance while they're on this side of the dirt (but are perfectly willing to finish throwing our parents, the Silents, under the bus, and have found in Paul Ryan the perfect GenX patsy cheerleader to help them do it), Gordinier is more interested in pointing out to us that what we're already doing is (cough) changing the world, by saving the best bits of everything that has come before it it, one hyperfocused hobbyist at a time (like, say, that wonderful soul who put all of that Byzantine Secular Classical Music on YouTube -- to say nothing of those wonderful souls who invented YouTube!), and continually innovating ways to keep bouncing forward all that good stuff AND making new stuff of our own.

And yes, part of what made reading this book such a pleasure for me was the way it forced me to look at how I'm conducting myself through my early 40s, especially as an artist, and to realize that what I'm doing really does matter, even if mass culture doesn't understand or respect it. You guys do. And that's plenty! Which is how this sonnet, describing a rare chance meeting with a fellow beneficiary of my idyllic footnote below, came about.

Really, all I can think of right now, sipping wine and bouncing around my room to Nirvana and Soundgarden, is in The Two Towers (film or book, it doesn't matter, but the moment in the film is nicely done) when Gandalf talks about how the Ents are about to wake up and realize they are strong.

Might just be that we need to pay a little more attention to what our peers are doing and tune out the screech of the Boomillenials a bit more. I've gotten really, really good at the latter, but I could do so much better with the former.

*I had an idyllic, out-of-sync childhood in rural Wyoming, the land the Boomers kind of forgot. That's not to say there weren't any of that age group, far from it, but in a place that takes pride in slogans like "come to Wyoming and turn your clock back 30 years" even the 30-somethings of my childhood were pretty much just Silent Generation types with less grey hair and fewer wrinkles. Us kids had it really, really good in Saratoga, WY in the 1970s, beneficiaries of a sort of Silent Generation conspiracy to filter out most of the crap of the larger world and bring us the good stuff. The Utah Symphony played concerts in our crappy school gymnasium. An amazing old-timey historical tent show called Chatauqua came through every summer. The Texas Opera company staged full on performances in that same crappy gym where the Utah Symphony played and where from time to time mid-level touring ballet companies performed, too. I had an almost-complete collection of Horizon magazines at my disposal. We had a river to splash around in, bike trails to get us anywhere but keep us (mostly) out of car traffic, and a series of truly extraordinary schoolteachers who taught us how to make stone-age hunting tools and build snow caves along with our three Rs. So I was ill-prepared for the real world of the East Coast, where the hostility of Boomers was waiting to dump bucket after bucket of freezing, stinging salt water over my head before I'd even gotten my bearings. I endured it for almost a decade before deciding I'd had enough and moved back to Wyoming, where I was welcomed back with open arms. I tried to give a new generation the kind of advantages I'd enjoyed in my same hometown, but I didn't have enough co-conspirators to achieve the critical mass to pull it off. Ah, me. But now, here I still am, and now there is the internet. Sing praise, Gaudeamus.

Essential Viewing: René Laloux's FANTASTIC PLANET

Fantastic Planet (aka La Planète Sauvage) is a 1973 animated science fiction film directed by René Laloux, production designed by Roland Topor, written by both of them and animated at Jiří Trnka Studio. I first heard about it years and years ago, when I stumbled across another bizarrely awesome animated French science fiction film, Light Years, but at that time the Internet was not the wonder of opportunity and streaming of everything that it is today.

Just last evening, a friend of mine on Google+ embedded it there. I was in a position to watch it but couldn't have the sound on so, remembering that it was a story with little dialogue, I decided to just let it play with no sound and try watching it as though it were a silent film. It holds up beautifully that way, a testament to the filmmaking team's talent for visual storytelling.

If you've never seen this great film, take some time (it's not much longer than an hour) and click to embiggen. It's a gloriously weird, somewhat sad but always fascinating piece of film history.

JOHN CARTER - A Mistitled Film That Did Not Deserve To Flop

When I first heard that Disney, of all studios, was going to be the people that finally brought Edgar Rice Burroughs' wonderful Barsoom books to the big screen, my feelings were as mixed as anyone's. Of course this would mean that the violence would be sanitized, that Dejah Thoris and the rest of the Red Martian gang would be wearing far too much clothing, but, I told myself, with the Mouse calling the shots, we might actually get a good treatment of that chivalrous pulp hero, John Carter, in all his uncomplicated and hokey glory. And this thought pleased me: cynicism and sarcasm were old and stale long before David Foster Wallace pointed out the dreariness of the tyranny of irony. A nice, earnest do-gooder would be just the thing to perk everybody up again. Plus, modern special effects technology would do visual justice to the wonders of Barsoom and the beings inhabiting it.

Well, I was mostly right. I'm quite gutted not to see Captain John Carter of Virginia in this film -- he's been replaced by a bog-standard cynical Hollywood anti-hero who has the same name -- but pretty much everything else about this film is so right that when I'm watching (which I did again today, bringing a pal who had never read the books)* I don't care. The Green Martians look great. The Red Martians look great. The White Apes are far scarier and more awesome than I'd ever imagined them. The airships are nothing like I'd imagined at all, but are so cool that I'm going to write to Santa Claus and ask for one for Christmas. And, too much clothing or not, Lynn Collins made a perfect Dejah Thoris the titular** Princess of Mars whose beauty is really the least of her qualities -- she's a top-notch scientist and a leader and a spectacular fighter, really a more rounded character than she ever gets to be in the books (wherein she is often reduced to a thing that must be rescued). Which makes up for a lot, as in maybe even making up for the substitution of an unshaven pretty boy asshole for the manly and upright Captain Carter.

But, while you get glimpses of the airships and the Martians in this trailer, does it in anyway convey the sheer awesome action and pulpy goodness of the Barsoom books? Go read one, any one you can get your hands on, if you're not familiar with them, then watch this trailer again. Your head will spin from the disconnect, the moody, dreary music, the dirge-like tone of the dialogue clips, the emphasis on Carter as a dude walking in the rain in New York and on the fictionalized Burroughs' loss of him. Would you want to see this film based on that trailer? Would you know you were in for a glorious bit of fantasy and action and old-fashioned romance? No. "Find your destiny." I'm gonna hurl.

Seriously, though, there is so much to like about this film it makes me all but gnash my teeth when everyone focuses on how much money it's losing. Because Disney made a pretty good film despite themselves, and have only their marketing department to blame for its commercial failure. And this makes me mad, because there are so many other good Barsoom stories that would be fabulous on the big screen (and better than some of the dreck that is getting greenlit, judging from the previews I saw today. Battleship? Really? Talk about something that needs to be a flop...) and now probably won't ever get made unless Disney decides it needs another big fat loss leader or tax write-off or whatever it is they thought they were going to get when they decided to make John Carter.

So I'll just have to dream. And of course, get the DVD when it's available, because screw you guys, it was a fun movie.

*And who told me as we walked out of the theater that he'd liked the movie very much indeed and it wasn't what he'd been expecting at all.

**Well, should be titular. This film adapted the very first of Burroughs' Barsoom books, A Princess of Mars, and what moron had the idea of changing the film's title to just John Carter and how the hell did he/she persuade all the other morons that this idea was a good one? I want to kick that person's ass all day long.

John Carter

As you might guess, I'm a big fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs and especially of his Barsoom books. When I first heard a few years ago that a film adaptation was at last in the works, I sat down and re-read them all from the beginning and found that they hold up incredibly well. They're exciting, imaginative, romantic, everything that pulp sci-fi should be (in fact, they pretty much defined the genre). I believe I undressed once or twice and tried to come up with a Dejah Thoris outfit as a young'un (and my Own Dear Sinister Mom, who reads this blog, is either saying "what what WHAT?" or laughing and nodding). I see from this and other clips that Disney has decided movie-Dejah Thoris needs more clothing, which is too bad, but we live in puritanical times. Anyway, it's Barsoom, so I'm going. Probably on opening day. What about you?

TIFF 2011: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's HEADSHOT

Sigh. This was one of the films I was most excited about seeing at this year's festival -- Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe was really beautiful and cool -- but it wound up being a bit disappointing. As I said in the Audioboo that accompanied my post on Roman's Circuit yesterday, I was originally disinclined to say more about Headshot than that, but looking over clips and things again I am developing a retroactive fondness for the film. Perhaps another case of memory migration? And is this why I recall liking Last Life in the Universe so much more the first time than I did on a recent second viewing? It's kind of bugging me.

This time around, Ratanaruang was adapting a novel -- the novelist, the prolific Wyn Lyovarin, seems to be a fan of Ratanaruang's and has sent him copies of everything he's written -- called Rain Falling Up in the Sky. It's big-time crime fiction, with cops and drug dealers and hitmen and femmes fatale galore, romping all over dirty old Bangkok. Our hero was a cop until the crime boss found a way to manipulate/force him into switching sides and becomes an expert hitman -- the action scenes in which he plies his trade are pretty good from my point of view, but I'm no action aficionado so take that with however much salt you wish -- until one day a botched hit leaves him, yes, headshot. When he recovers, he sees everything upside-down, which is the hook that intrigued me about this film beyond Ratanaruang's name in the credits.

What ensues is a decently plotted crime tale, with just enough twists and surprises to keep from getting boring... except for the fact that this is Thai cinema and it's apparently a rule, written or un- (Ratanaruang educated us after the film, a bit, about the kinds of restrictions the Thai government places on filmmakers, including no negative depictions of Buddhist monks or people dressed as monks, ever) that there must be a lot of long, static shots of important characters staring profoundly into or just beyond the camera. They were okay in Last Life in the Universe because it was Tadanobu Asano doing the staring, and we knew the kind of lushly gorgeous scenery he was staring at, and it was part of a slower, more thoughtful story, but they were pretty out of place here, however attractive this new leading man (Nopachai Jayanama, who is very attractive indeed) may be.

And, too, while the neurological damage and ensuing strange point of view is what really makes this film unique, it's not really utilized; it's more of a throwaway that's good for trailers and promotional blurbs, to make it sound more interesting than it is.

And so between this and Uncle Boonmee (which we dubbed Uncle Bore-Me) I will never get Paul Laroquod to go to a Thai film again.

But damn, is Pen-ek Ratanaruang a funny speaker, very dry and subtle and understated and hilarious. "This film is in Thai," he counseled us before the screening, "So it is subtitled, so if you cannot read there is no point in staying," he said in his quiet, small voice...

He hasn't lost me yet, but I tap my foot a bit in his general direction....

Oh, and I WANT that typewriter.

TIFF 2011: THIS IS NOT A FILM

Imagine you're a filmmaker. Maybe you even are one. And it's all you've ever wanted to do, and you're good at it, and the world has come to love your work and love you for doing that work.

Now imagine your government has banned you from doing it for 20 years because it finds your work politically objectionable in some way.

That's the plight in which we find Jafar Panahi as this elegantly moving little documentary, This is Not a Film, opens. His case is on appeal; his lawyer is on the fight; his family is trying to keep his hopes up. But he's at home and going a bit stir crazy, a completed script that's ready to shoot tormenting him. So he asks a fellow filmmaker, a documentarian, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, to come over and just noodle around with him. Bring a camera.

The resulting portrait of an artist going a little stir crazy feels like it should be a lot more uncomfortable to watch than it is; Panahi is doing his best to handle his situation with grace and humor and the cracks only really show once, towards the end of an extended "scene" in which he is reading from his script and sort of enacting it in a room of his home (I have been banned from writing and directing, but not from acting, he tells us early on. Bit of a stretch, but aren't loopholes always?).

For me, the film is almost stolen by Panahi's daughter's pet iguana, who treats Panahi as part of the furniture and stares impassively into Mirtahmasb's camera for long, hilarious seconds in the process -- which becomes retroactively even more amusing later when a neighbor who knows Panahi is home and bored tries to press him into dogsitting a yappy dachsund who wants no part of the filmmaking and comes unglued at the sight of the equipment.

This is Not a Film was screened for free at the Toronto International Film Festival, and while there was no way Panahi was going to be let out of the country to attend, there were hopes that Mirtahmasb could -- alas, dashed; the documentarian was detained on his way to Toronto and may now be in the same pickle as Panahi. Good thing the duo seems to have invented a new way of not making a film: grab a guy who isn't in trouble yet and have him run the cameras while they talk about the film they'd be making if allowed. Repeat until everyone in the country is banned from making films. Nice job, Iran.

Oh, and in case you missed it, here's an AudioBoo I recorded with Paul Laroquod soon after seeing the film.

100 Books 42 - Kobo Abe's THE FACE OF ANOTHER

I wrote about this book a little bit last month, just because of the musings it provoked about Facebook and Google. I hadn't yet finished it then, though, and hadn't yet confronted its essential, oppressive creepiness -- it is by far the creepiest book I have ever read, and it's not even horror.

I experienced this story first several years ago via the film adaptation by the great Hiroshi Teshigahara:



One of the things that interests me is the tandem experience of book and film; the film really explores the idea -- a man's face is destroyed in an accident and he creates (or, in the film, has created) a mask so lifelike almost nobody realizes it's a mask at all, only to find that instead of restoring him fully to his life and his humanity, he has become more of a monster than he was when his face was a hideous mass of scars and ruined tissue -- from the exterior. The plot wanders quite a bit from that of the novel, but that's immaterial for my purposes; what interests me now is how book and film complement each other; the film cannot, except in voice-overs, really explore the inner man of the scientist except indirectly (hence the introduction of a sub-plot lifted mostly from a film our protagonist watches early on in the book, of a girl, her face half destroyed in the Hiroshima bombing, who does charitable work for WWII veterans despite her disfigurement, but who is ultimately too isolated by it to continue); for all its startling imagery (get a load of that doctor's office, wholly invented for  the film), it does not begin to come close to what makes the book such a disturbing read.

The book is written in an extended epistolary/diary form; the first person narrator is the scientist (nameless in the book) who has lost his face, writing an extended confessional to his wife. And herein lies the creepiness, for while he believes he has fashioned the mask (in secret, all on his own, in the book) to "restore the roadway" between him and his wife, he has gotten so carried away with the sudden duality of existence it affords him that he has actually come to think of The Mask as another person, a person who quickly becomes his Mr. Hyde, all id and transgressions, all an exploration of what he can get away with when no one knows it's him. Inevitably -- and I give nothing away here that isn't given away in the very opening paragraphs of the book -- he and it decide to see about seducing his own wife; the roadway he sought to restore to her is left forgotten; he takes the long way round and comes back at her as a stranger, and then rages with jealousy when Mask Him succeeds.

Throughout this confession, he reveals that the roadway was washed out long ago; he has created a wife-emulator in his head who is much stupider than she really is, less perceptive and  with no self-determination, and unwaveringly regards his real wife as that lesser being. She is trapped in his imagination, confined to the smallest possible space, surrounded on all sides by him and his limited, limiting understanding of her -- and the further we get into the novel, the more oppressive is his tendency to project onto her most, if not all, of his negative feelings about himself. It's a classic trope, but I've never seen it so elegantly, horrifyingly done as here. The build-up to the actual meeting between Mask Him and his wife treats the seduction as a fait accompli ratchets the depressing creepiness up to eleven; all the time we spend alone (except for the Mask) in the nameless man's skull dials it up to twelve.

I can't recommend this one highly enough, shattering though it is.

Jac Schaeffer's TiMER

I can't decide if I need a shower because I just sat through a romantic comedy (eww) or if I want to think some more (by which I mean blog, I guess) about this film, which I just watched out of wayward laziness and essential trust in Netflix's recommendations.

It has all of the usual rom-com conceits, starting with the idea that an unbelievably pretty actress can be believable as a lovelorn lonley heart, continuing with a meet cute and ensuing idyll and all of the other crap that makes the formula so annoyingly predictable I want to scream at everyone to stop forking over money to see "new" iterations of it so that maybe Hollywood and its wannabes will stop making it. It's all there, and it's eyeball-rolling and scream-worthy and reductionist and highly emetically hateable.

There's the argument for how I need a shower now, and a good rinse with some brain bleach.

Amazingly, though, while honoring faithfully every single one of those conventions, this film also managed to critique them, not by mocking them, exaggerating them, undercutting them or sending them up, but by presenting them in complete, wide-eyed earnest, trusting the story's real engine to keep us chugging through them.

And chug I did.

As the trailer above lays out, the world of TiMER is a world in which somehow an ultimate formula has been established whereby each person can find his or her absolute perfect soul mate by trusting a gadget implanted in the arm to go off when eye contact with that person is at last made. Furthermore, the gadget can predict to the second just how long the client has to wait before that magic moment: everyone has a countdown -- provided his or her soul mate has also so been implanted. How all this is supposed to work is glossed over via infomercial-esque "interviews" with scientists using a lot of buzzwords like oxytocin; we're not supposed to sit there and ponder how it's so or even if it's really possible in the real world. We're in a thought experiment, here.

But it's a thought experiment conducted way outside the lab, out in the big, messy world which isn't all that much tidier for everyone's potentially having that one big uncertainty (which, since this is rom-com, is basically the only big uncertainty worth worrying about, natch) removed. How like life that is: with that question more or less answered for everyone, everyone now finds something new to stress out over, namely how to conduct themselves with potential partners who really aren't "The One" while you're waiting for him or her to show up.

So here's our protagonist, Oona (Emma Caulfield, known to us nerds as the vengeance demon with a heart of gold from Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- interesting casting there, what?), who starts off the film coercing her current beau to get implanted (men who don't have TiMERS are now suspect; they're not serious, they're toxic bachelors, they're dangerous) to see if he's her "One" and dumps him when he proves not to be, even though they seem to have been having a nice time together -- the ideal of her future is more important than the real of her present. Her attitude in general seems to be that dallying with anyone who is not one's One is essentially cheating on one's One and should be frowned upon.

But then, of course, she meets someone the old fashioned way, someone whose TiMER puts him just months away from The Day but who doesn't seem all that hung up on it and thinks she's pretty swell. Her TiMER still blank, she knows he's not the One but he's rather swell himself and they spend some swell time making each other feel even more swell and golly gee, could the gadgets just be wrong because really, they're pretty darn good together, if only... if only...

Developments develop, complications complicate and a whole lot of people, not just Oona and Mr. Swell, find themselves in terrific muddles, all because of this constant tension between the real and the ideal that is now given concrete form on almost everyone's wrists. As she looks for answers and whines cutely to her similarly troubled (and also improbably pretty) sister, she starts meeting people who have opted out of the system altogether and seem pretty happy. Some even seem to have found love the old-fashioned way, and decided the gadgets couldn't tell them they're wrong about it.

But our girl has grown up in a world where the gadgets are taken for granted and their pronouncements as deterministic as the adage about death and taxes.

So this is a science fiction rom-com hybrid with a lot of ontology on its noggin and, because it is also an art film, it doesn't even try to answer all the questions it poses -- not even the narrative ones.

So again my dillemma: shower or blog? Looks like I already decided, doesn't it?

Veit Helmer's TUVALU

We never see the island nation of Tuvalu in this odd little German experimental film, but seeing Tuvalu is not the point at all as we explore the last days of a decrepit bathhouse in Eastern Europe and the lives of the people who are keeping it going.

Tuvalu is that oddity of oddities, a silent film with sound, by which I mean it uses all of the tropes of silent film -- broadly gesture-driven acting that occasionally strays into mime, strong and somewhat exaggerated facial expressions -- but also employs a full range of sound effects. What it lacks, for the most part, is dialogue, and what little there is, is in a hodgepodge of Eastern European languages that goes unsubtitled because subtitles are not necessary; the meaning is always perfectly clear, even when the rare spoken words are not obvious English loan words or cognates.

It evokes great old silents (especially German Expressionist triumphs like The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari), too, in its monochrome cinematography, mostly warm and rich sepia but with occasional outdoor scenes shot in green or blue, and a wonderful handling of light, especially in the scenes taking place in the weirdly beautiful old swimming pool at the bath house's heart.

But the real joy in Tuvalu is in watching its lead actors. Denis Lavant, who plays Anton, the good son of the bath house's aging, dotty owners (the bad son is engaged in trying to tear down and sell off the bath house to developers), has not only a wonderfully expressive face but an uncommon grace of movement; he's like a ballet dancer or a gymnast as he bounds kinetically through scenes that put these abilities of his on fine display as he scrambles to maintain the illusion that not only is everything in the bath house still in working order but is in working order through impressive modern technology, an illusion he creates largely through putting the business's regulars to work behind the scenes to convince an inspector that the showers, blow dryers, and the all-important boiler (a fantasy in steam punk) are in perfect working order.

He's paired here with Russian actress Chulpan Khamatova, who is as cute as Audrey Tatou and as opaquely innocent-looking as Patricia Arquette, as Eva. Hers is the dream to leave for Tuvalu on her boat that is almost in working order; all she needs is one part that happens to also be a crucial part for the boiler that keeps the bath house going...

Of course Anton falls in love with Eva, in a series of charming scenes that play with perspective in eye-bending ways, long before they realize they are actually at cross-purposes. The course of true love never did run smoothly, not even in a swimming pool full of goldfish...

My favorite scene occurs toward the end, after evil brother Gregor has persuaded the family to replace Mama (who mans the admissions window and has developed a weird habit of accepting buttons as currency) with a fancy modern ticket selling machine, only to have it break during his first demonstration. In a perfect illustration of the sunk cost fallacy that reminded me wonderfully of the dotty muscle-powered space program in Victor Pelevin's Omon Ra, the family has set up the remnants of the machine in the ticket window; when an inspector attempts to gain admission with a button, Mama shakes her head and insists he put an actual coin in the slot. The coin rolls down a shute into a glass jar, Mama simulates some computer-ish whirring noises, hands the inspector a ticket, and finishes up by flicking a cigarette lighter to illuminate a light-up panel on the machine. It's hilarious and touching and poignant all at once and perfectly encapsulates right there all that I love about this movie.

So, if you're looking for something a little different to while away an hour or so, I can't recommend this film highly enough. As with most of the weird stuff I've found lately, it's streaming right now on Netflix. Go for it!

Richard Lester's THE BED SITTING ROOM

The Bed Sitting Room Directed by Richard Lester



Damn it, I'm pretty sure I just went insane. Either that or Richard "Superman II" Lester did back in 1969. Or both.

I like a weird movie. Terry Gilliam always makes me smile, and never so much so as in Brazil (except maybe also Twelve Monkeys). Alejandro Jodorowsky makes me scratch my head in (mostly) that good way. Stanley Kubrick is always entertaining, especially when he's romping through Doctor Strangelove. And long have I been a Monty Python fan -- so long I can't remember not being one. Because my mother is that awesome.

While I can't say I've ever seriously asked myself what would happen if we took all of the above, ran it through a blender (with a good dose of the Philip K. Dick of Dr. Bloodmoney) and filmed the result, it would appear that someone else did -- and many years before a lot of that stuff even existed: in 1969 Richard Lester, who would later make two Christopher Reeve Superman movies and a lot of other junk, teamed up with the original authors of the stage play, Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, and made this utter farce, The Bed Sitting Room.

The Bed Sitting Room is an absurd picaresque that follows a handful of characters through a Britain that has been utterly destroyed by a "nuclear misunderstanding" that may or may not have had its origins in a dispute over how much rent the nation owed the Chinese for continued occupancy of No. 10 Downing Street. Of the estimated 20 people who remain alive, the nearest in line to the throne is a Mrs. Etheyl Shroake, whose name and residence cause no end of metrical dilemmas to those who sing the revised national anthem and who looks most uncomfortable seated royally on a horse. Fortunately, she doesn't have to much as she is the least interesting figure, with the least screen time in the film. Yeah, it's like that.

What we have instead of a dotty suburban dame trying to rule the rubble is a family who live on a still-running train in the London Underground, who emerge into the wasteland above only when the parents finally decide it's time they found a nurse to help daughter Penelope have her baby -- she has been pregnant for 18 months after all. And that is not their only cause for hurry; whatever bomb destroyed Britain has left behind powerfully weird mutagens; a Peer is transforming into the titular bed sitting room, a sergeant into a dog, and as for Mummy and Daddy, well!

All of this madness is handled with pure British aplomb even as ridiculous lines are delivered: "I always knew my inside leg would lead to power" being, perhaps, my favorite, except, perhaps, when Peter Cook, in a move way prefiguring his iconic appearance in The Princess Bride, dons a mitre and performs a farcical wedding ceremony amidst the rubble of St. Paul's Cathedral.

And hey, it won a Hugo award!

To watch this film is to constantly wonder if it is real, so fantastic is its melange of ideas and images and slingshots into the boffo. It's streaming on Netflix right now; if you think you can stand this much awesome, you owe it to yourself to go have a look.

But avoid beverages unless you like spraying them all over the living room.

100 Books 8 - John Wyndham's THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS

The Midwich Cuckoos - By John Wyndham - Ballantine Books

Originally published in 1957, well before much in the way of feminist literature was hitting the racks, The Midwich Cuckoos frames, in its weird, pulpy way, a lot (though certainly not all) of the issues that the feminist movement would soon be bringing to everybody's attention, at least in the novel's first third or so.

Since the book has been made -- twice -- into Major Motion Pictures retitled Village of the Damned, I imagine most everyone who might be part of its target audience knows its premise: a tiny English village's people (actually, all of its life forms) mysteriously loses consciousness for a day or so, and when everyone wakes up, all the women of childbearing age are pregnant, even the determined spinsters and the younger member of a delicately hinted at lesbian couple. That a number of these women are young and unmarried raises early moral issues within the small and very traditional community, as one might expect for 1957, but the wife of a community leader quickly calls a meeting and successfully talks the village around so there will be no posturing, no sniggering, no remarks about dirty girls having premarital sex, because all of the women are in the same boat -- and their men along with them, even before it becomes obvious that the children Midwich is bearing are not the biological children of Midwich's women.

It's a fine line between pregnancy and parasitism, really, and the line is mostly drawn by social means. A woman who sought motherhood and tried (whether the old-fashioned way or by the various modern means available to us today) and succeeded in becoming pregnant is happy, if anxious, anticipating the longed-for day with joy and cautious preparation (even more so nowadays in our age of pre-natal vitamin regimens, lamaze and other classes, hundreds of books on what to expect, even Facebook plug-ins that display for anyone who wants to look an approximation of what the fetus looks like on any particular day of its own personal gestational timeline). A woman who didn't, who erred into it or was forced into it, experiences it as an unwelcome hijacking of her body and her life. Every unwanted or unplanned pregnancy has in it the seeds of a very personal horror story.

Though The Midwich Cuckoos has a male narrator and is mostly told from the cuckholded men's perspective, the horror of this second kind of pregnancy experience seeps through every page, even before the kids are born, start growing at twice the normal rate, and exhibit their bizarre interconnectedness and frightening power to compel and inhibit their host-parents' behavior. The anecdote, second-hand, of course, of a female PhD who was a researcher at a government facility situated within the "Dayout" zone illustrates this brilliantly: not only did she strenuously object to the imposed pregnancy, to the compulsion to return to Midwich she experienced a week or so after the baby was born, but also, and rightly so in my opinion, to the far greater imposition of childcare and rearing, on her time and on her financial resources. Disowning the child in no uncertain terms and ready to make a stink that would shatter the cone of silence the government has barely managed to settle over the village, she escapes and probably just in time, for the worst, in pulp-fiction terms if not in the secret feminist sympathetic terms of the early novel, is yet to come, though even then, as we learn of other affected villages around the world, there's more to chill the uppity woman's heart: while in a few places mere infanticide occurred, in at least one other location the pregnancies provoked what we now refer to as honor violence.

All that aside, if all you're looking for is good old-fashioned British sci-fi, small in scale, skeptical in tone but still provocative of wonder and curiosity, you can't do a whole lot better than John Wyndham. Day of the Triffids delighted me early and often, both in book and TV miniseries form, after all. That it took me so many years and rather a round-about path to come to The Midwich Cuckoos is weird and possibly shameful; I finally came round to it because of Warren Ellis, very likely my very favorite comic book writer, whose webcomic (drawn by the remarkable Paul Duffield) Freakangels is in part based on the idea of "what if the Midwich Cuckoos had gotten to grow up?"

Yeah, spoilerish there, but the blurb for this blog does warn you to 'ware spoilers, and this is such an old book now, twice filmed, that even I already knew more or less how it ended before taking it up -- and I've seen neither film as yet, though I plan to remedy that tonight, as the John Carpenter version is streaming on Netflix (the earlier film, alas, I must wait for a pysical DVD to come into my hot little hands, but it will, it will). That's a subject for a whole 'nother post, maybe, though I imagine it's been written about plenty before: how some books or films or otherwise-told tales are so deeply a part of our collective cultural knowledge base that their big surprises are no longer surprises at all (I still maintain it's a mark of high quality that a culutural production can stand up even if its big secret is blown). We know what Soylent Green is made of; we know what Rosebud really is. We know Dracula is gonna get staked and that Ahab is going to regret getting his whale (speaking of which, I've not yet read Moby Dick, but shall as one of my 100 Books this year).

I approached this book expecting to be entertained: I love pulp fiction and sci-fi, especially with a good whiff of horror or an apocalyptic bent thrown in. I wasn't expecting, though, to get the genuine chills I did from the predicament of the poor women of Midwich, some of whom, sadly, go on loving their cuckoos right until the end. And I don't mind it a bit when my fun makes me think!

ADDENDUM: the next day. Early this morning I did, indeed, watch the John Carpenter remake of Village of the Damned. I am usually a fan of Carpenter's special brand of sci-fi/horror cheese (In the Mouth of Madness is a film over which I chortle often, and the phrase "John Trent laughter" has become a personal synecdoche for a state of horror so profound you can only laugh through it), but in this instance I found it mostly inappropriate to the subject matter, and found the ending especially laughable. The film so badly glossed over the extreme moral pickle into which the children maneuver the village and the external authorities with their demands (and, arguably, by their very existence) that the decision the (largely invented for the film) main character takes, which in itself is sorta-faithful to the book, makes no sense at all except in that it is faithful to the book. Without the arguments for it being presented, however, it's a quixotic and melodramatic gesture even without all the silly brick wall mental blocking theatrics. Pah!

Mary & Max: Poignant Claymation: Yeah, It's a Thing

Mary & Max - Directed by Adam Elliot - Featuring the voices of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tony Collette and Eric Bana - Melodrama Pictures

As you can see from the above trailer, "Mary and Max" is a gloriously dark and subdued piece of claymation filmmaking, with some top-notch talent behind it.

When I announced that I was finally watching it yesterday, a Twitter friend, Robynn McCarthy, counseled me to have a box or four of Kleenex handy, and she was not wrong. The story of a decades-long pen friendship between an awkward little girl in Australia and an even more awkward middle-aged man in New York City was as moving as it was funny even before the serious tear-jerker ending.

This film is a complete emotional roller-coaster of low-comedy pratfall (nary a bird is seen that doesn't crap hilariously on something), high camp (it's obvious long before the other shoe finally drops that Mary is basically her childhood crush's beard) and serious meditation on what it is to live with Asperger's Syndrome and how it might just be considered offensive to consider that a disability. The characters are all fascinating (I could watch Mary's mom "test the sherry" all day) and the soundtrack a thigh-slapping commentary on the action it accompanies (a famous motif from Prokofiev's "Romeo & Juliet" is used to especially amusing effect).

A wave of the tissue to Juan and Lee (and Juan's wife Marie) at Movies You May Have Missed, an excellent film-lovers' podcast of which I've long been fond but have lately decided is unmissable, for telling me about this fantastic little film. I had missed it and might not ever have heard about it were it not for them.

Unnecessary Violence: The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I always approach film adaptations guardedly, expecting unexpected blows to my expectations. It seems that the more I love a story, the more it suffers at the hands of Hollywood. Rarely have I ever seen such violence done to one, though, as is done in the film adaptation of C.S. Lewis' charming novel of exploration and remediation, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

THE GOOD

That's not to say there is nothing to love about this rather pretty and well-made film. As has been the case with the previous two Narnia films, the production design and visual effects departments went all out to very attractive effect; the ship in particular is vividly realized and owes much to other seafaring films that have served that aspect of life and travel far better than did Lewis in his book. The crowding above and below decks, the intricacies of a sailing ship's workings, all brought to mind the best of modern sailing films, Peter Weir's wonderful adaptation of six or seven Patrick O'Brian novels into Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (a film that is, in its way, a textbook example of how, if you must play with a story or series in adapting it for the big screen, that should be done).

The casting, too, is nothing to complain of. Georgie Henley and Skander Keynes are back as the youngest Pevensie kids, and own their roles nicely, as do Ben Barnes as Caspian, Liam Neeson as Aslan and Tilda Swinton as the White Witch (which, huh? What's she doing in this thing? See below). The masterminds behind this film could not help but find a way to include Anna Poppelwell and William Mosley, too, in a bit of shoehorning that was far more graceful than many other improvements made to the story, and I don't begrudge their presence; I don't know how much work either is getting and perhaps they've been typecast.

The exceptional bit, though, and one thing I must applaud, is the addition to the young cast of the Narnia cycle, Will "Son of Rambow" Poulter as Eustace Clarence Scrubb, the Pevensies' annoying cousin who is redeemed by Narnia. Poulter simply steals the film, once again playing a Bully Who Learns Better (in a nice touch, he's an intellectual bully, a scoffer who refuses to be taken in, instead of a physical brute). His character is the only one who really develops or grows in the novel and this is given full expression in the film -- though even when he's being beastly, one can't help liking him. There's too much mischief in that face.

A lot of my lingering inclination to like this film rests on young Mr. Poulter.

THE BAD

Really, there isn't that much that is merely bad about this film, something I can only say because there is a heading yet to come, which is The Horrible. That said, well, some of the most charming scenes and peoples the book has to offer are given short shrift, repurposed, or removed altogether. I'm talking the Monopod/Dufflepuds, Coriakin and the People Beneath the Waves. The former's appearance is cut short and their charm lost (their tendency to agree with each other and their visual funniness remain, but gone or so-close-to-gone-as-might-as-well-be-this-film's-Bubo-the-Owl is their complete misunderstanding of their relationship with Coriakin and of themselves); the middle is warped into a mere signpost and engine of foreshadowing (See below); the last, an element of the end-tale to which I most looked forward, expecting it to be given wholly over to the wonderfully competent effects and design crew, reduced just to a lot of lilies floating on the surface of the sea. Boo!

THE HORRIBLE

The first two books/films in The Chronicles of Narnia are all about overcoming invasion and great evil, the White Witch in the first tale, the usurper Miraz and the Telmarines who subdued the real Narnia in the second. Because of this, I can almost understand the filmmakers' obvious concern that Voyage of the Dawn Treader does not fit this plot at all. Voyage is a story of exploration and mystery, of questions posed and solved; the engine that drives it is not a quest at all, but rather discovery (rediscovery, actually, if one wants to go deep in to the Narnian backstory, for many of the places found in Voyage were known to the Pevensies of old but lost and forgotten by the sea-fearing Telmarines, except for a few intrepid souls). What happened to those seven lords who ventured forth in Caspian's youth and never returned? What's out there? Can you really sail to the end of the world? Good and interesting questions all their own, and interlarded well with the story of Eustace's redemption. Quite enough to make a fine film, I would think.

But no. We had to trash that perfectly good plot, invent a quest-and-conquer-evil plot in its place, and force the characters from the first to instead enact the second. Suddenly the seven lost lords disappeared with Magic McGuffin Swords, and an island that is quite frightening and interesting just as it is is suddenly the home of Great Threatening Evil the likes of which we've not seen since Luke insisted on entering the Dark Side Tree on Dagobah. Except somehow it is a threat to all of Narnia and is stealing/swallowing up innocent villagers from a Narnian colony. Coriakin tells Caspian and the kids all about everything that lies ahead of them up to and including the Star's Daughter and the island of Ramandu (and there's a Blue Star to guide them there, FFS) and charges them with purging the icky evil of the Dark Island by dumping the aformentioned swords (after they collect 'em all, Pokemon!) onto the table on Ramandu's island. Dumb, dumb, dumb. But not a huge surprise because this is Hollywood.

But oh, what had to be sacrificed. Like most of the genuine drama and wonder that made Voyage of the Dawn Treader many people's favorite of the Narnia books (and I count your humble blogger in that number). Eustace's transformation into a dragon, for instance, is robbed almost completely of the horror of discovery and the pathos of Eustace's experience (all that is left of the former is some tears the blue-eyed dragon sheds early on). Every time I read this book, which I do often, I'm always moved and kind of amazed at the gradually dawning horror achieved in the transformation's reveal, and the dumb misery of it, the physical agony of the bracelet digging into the dragon's arm (and it most decidedly does not grow to fit the dragon uncomfortably snugly - it stays man-sized and digs and tears into the dragon's flesh; in the film it doesn't even leave a mark!) and the logic behind the transformation (the film just says, as a graceless throwaway line, that dragon's treasures are enchanted). That this sub-plot is then prolonged stupidly -- Eustace's tow service and a visually exciting but kind of stupid (and wholly invented by the filmmakers) Dragon Eustace versus the Sea Serpent monster fight -- is not nearly as unforgiveable as the cavalier way in which the transformation is effected and lived out in the film. Turning into a dragon was meant by Lewis as a lesson and a punishment, not a chance to be a hero. Rubbish.

But the real horrible in this film is the loss of wonder and mystery. Knowing already where all the ship is going to sail takes the fun out of the tale. Collect all the baubles and bring them together. Yawn.

Green mist to signify the eeeeeeevil of Dark Island? Wrong.

Cameo appearances by The White Witch to personify the eeeeeeeeevil? Also wrong. Are we going to see her in every movie? Is she going to take the place of the Lady of the Green Kirtle in The Silver Chair?

And sea serpent as Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man? Really? Wrong. So wrong.

As I final note, I will also observe that the 3D was used to no great effect except to induce the headaches that ill-done 3D so often brings. I'll put up with a little pain for something seriously immersive like Avatar, but anything less? Ugh (but this is my bad; another theater in town had both the 3D and the 2D versions but was out of my way; I saved some gas and time but at what cost? Ask me if/when the Tylenol kicks in).

Good thing they cast Will Poulter, that's all I can say.

Ha and also rumph.