Why Anna Faris will never take a wrench to the face.

For a while I kept up, in addition to this blog and the Sea Water Bliss website, a third web presence, the Spokesmonster Blog, where I talked about my gig in software marketing. This was back in the early days of my marketing career, when I was paid to make funny cartoons. (Nowadays I spend the bulk of my time writing press releases, and it’s pretty hard to blog about that. So the Spokesmonster Blog hasn’t been updated since late last year.)

In a post in 2008, I speculated about why, despite my best efforts to create a gender-balanced roster of cartoon monsters, my cartoons kept on coming out male.

Why is it so much easier to come up with male characters than female characters? I’m not the only animator with this deficiency. Look at the old Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons. Disney had Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck, but they were stuck in minor supporting roles. Warner Brothers had Bugs Bunny in a dress – that’s about it. The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park all have girls in them, but I’d reckon there are ten male characters for every female one.

Why aren’t animators more interested in drawing female characters? Perhaps they’re limited by a sense of decorum. You needn’t have seen too many episodes of The Simpsons to summon up examples of Homer being dropped from great heights, having heavy weights dropped on him, or losing his pants. Those things just don’t happen to Marge or Lisa. If the definition of comedy is inflicting pain or physical humiliation on your characters, and if our culture is uncomfortable with seeing women brutalised in those ways, that’s a powerful disincentive to drawing female cartoons. Why use Daisy Duck if we can’t clunk her over the head for laffs? We’ll just use Donald instead.

I was reminded of these speculations while reading this profile of the comic actress Anna Faris in the April issue of the New Yorker. Why is the funny Faris wasted in so many unfunny movies? Perhaps because the men in charge of making movies aren’t interested in casting funny women:

David Zucker, the director of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, says that the recipe for classic comedy is to pair a dumb, thin guy with a smarter fat guy: Laurel and Hardy, Norton and Kramden, Rubble and Flintstone. “That wouldn’t work with two women, because…” he trailed off, then suggested, “Maybe women have a built-in dignity, and if a woman slips on a banana peel…” After a moment, he concluded, “You know, maybe it’s just that I’ve never tried it.”

…The director Keenen Ivory Wayans says that vanity impedes most actresses’ efforts at humor. Referring to the scene in Old School of Will Ferrell streaking, he said, “If Will Ferrell was a girl, and she’s got a belly and a hairy back, she’s not running down the street naked.”

I think Zucker and Wayans, in their floundering way, are onto something. This “built-in dignity” that Zucker refers to isn’t exactly built-in; it’s imposed. It’s a by-product of our culture’s protective attitude toward girls. Perhaps this attitude is old-fashioned, but human biology is pretty old-fashioned too. As Faris acknowledges:

“I felt like I was born with a disadvantage – not only female but small, and not particularly athletic. If there is a God, it’s so confounding why he made a physically weaker gender, but one that was just as smart. Couldn’t we just be dumb, and weak, and happy?” She smiled. “Such were the thoughts of a fourteen-year-old girl.”

Since Faris was a young girl there’s been a proliferation of ass-kicking Ripleys and Xenas and Buffys in our popular culture – characters intended to subvert our assumptions about female helplessness. Yet in some ways we’re actually more protective of the “physically weaker gender” than we used to be. Take 1940′s The Philadelphia Story – #5 on the American Film Institute’s Top 10 Romantic Comedies list. In the very first scene, Cary Grant grabs his soon-to-be-ex-wife Katharine Hepburn by the face and pushes her roughly to the ground. The accompanying musical cue tells us it’s meant to be funny.

Take that, uppity female!

Nowadays, you’d never show the hero acting so brutishly. In the 21st century, the surest way to make an audience hate a movie bad guy isn’t to show him kicking a dog – it’s to show him abusing his wife.

Even the most cro-magnon Hollywood producer must see that Anna Faris is funny. But he probably also recognizes that there’s a narrower range of funny that she’s able to occupy. Audiences are happy to watch Faris bumble around and trip over her high heels, but we’re not so keen on seeing her get stabbed with a fork, or hit in the face with a wrench, or threatened with anal rape – punishments routinely meted out to male comedians.

Much of modern comedy – especially the kind of comedy favoured by moviegoing teenage boys – is centered on violence. Should we feel bad about that? Maybe we should; I don’t, really. But so long as we laugh at Charlie Day getting fork-stabbed while cringing at Cary Grant’s comedic domestic abuse – so long as that double standard endures – funny women will always be at a disadvantage.

M.

Dren / Not Dren: The unsatisfying ending of Splice.

Splice is four-fifths of a superior science-fiction movie. Then something goes wrong. In the paragraphs below, I’m going to talk about precisely what goes wrong, so if you haven’t seen Splice yet, you should head down to your local second-run movie theatre and watch it before reading further.

***

Perhaps we can better identify what’s wrong with the ending of Splice by comparing the movie with its most obvious antecedent, David Cronenberg’s The Fly. As you’ll recall, at the end of The Fly, the direly mutated Jeff Goldblum kidnaps Geena Davis from the doctor’s office to prevent her from aborting their baby. He takes her back to his lab and spells out his nutty plan to use the teleporter to combine himself, her, and their unborn child into a single being. Then his rotting flesh sloughs away and he turns into an animatronic monster.

I can understand why Cronenberg chose to do this. If you go to see a monster movie called The Fly, you expect to see a giant fly – not an actor swathed in lumpy latex. The problem is, we’re not only watching a monster movie, we’re also watching a movie about the relationship of Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. It’s the relationship that makes the movie interesting. And suddenly, right at the climax of the film, one of the two main actors disappears and is replaced with a slime-covered puppet.

This is a problem with The Fly. But it’s not that big a problem, because A) it happens a minute or two before the end of the movie, at a point of maximum tension, so we don’t have time to think about it, and B) in the puppet’s final scene, when it helps Geena Davis aim the shotgun at its own head, we’re willing to believe that the puppet is Jeff Goldblum. It’s a leap, but we can project our feelings about Goldblum’s character onto this pathetic creature.

At the end of Splice, a similar transformation occurs. The actress who plays Dren, the most sympathetic character and one-third of the romantic-incestuous triangle at the dramatic core of the movie, disappears, and is replaced with a totally different actor. [Correction - see update, below.]

At this point, I stopped caring. I felt gypped. Intellectually I can acknowledge that this spiny naked guy leaping through the trees is supposed to be Dren. But I can’t transfer my affections to him because he’s obviously not Dren. He’s some guy I’ve never seen before, and his fate doesn’t interest me.

Why is it easier for me to identify with puppet-Goldblum than with pseudo-Dren? I suspect it’s precisely because a puppet isn’t a person. It’s a thing – an empty vessel. Its eyes give us nothing, they’re only glassy orbs, and we can imagine that we see Goldblum’s busy mind at work behind them. But pseudo-Dren is very obviously a person. His eyes look back at us, and we say, “Who’s this dude?”

The ending might have worked better if they’d somehow retained Delphine Chanéac, the actress who plays Dren, to portray her post-transformation self. Still, I can’t help but think that the whole ending is a wrong turn. Splice sets up a fascinating, twisted relationship among its three lead characters, but the relationship is blown to bits before we get a chance to explore it.

M.

Update, August 22 2010: A few weeks ago, Niky posted in the comments that the male Dren was actually played by Delphine Chanéac. I had trouble believing this, but today was the first chance I’ve had to do a little more in-depth Googling – and it seems Niky is right. Here’s an interview with Delphine where she confirms it; the relevant discussion starts around 2:41.

Obviously, this revelation undermines the premise of my complaint about the ending. Therefore, I withdraw my objection: Splice is a perfect movie.

Spike Jonze’s I’m Here will melt your callous human heart.

Don’t wait for me to tell you why. Schlep your laptop to a quiet room, ask your roommate or spouse to keep out of your hair for a half-hour, and watch Spike Jonze’s new short film I’m Here. Then come back and we’ll discuss.

[Spoilers ahead.]

I think it’s a brilliant, sad little movie. On the surface it’s, as the website declares, a love story. But it’s also a story about deterioration and decay. The bittersweetness of the ending comes from the realisation that Sheldon must be aware that his sacrifice is futile – that the accident-prone Francesca isn’t going to have any more luck with her new body than she had with her old one.

What is going on with Francesca, anyway? We see her carelessly fall down early in the film, but every one of her subsequent accidents occurs offscreen. Presumably her arm was knocked off by careless humans in that mild-looking mosh pit. But when she subsequently loses a leg, and then has her torso horribly crushed, Sheldon never asks how it happened. The implication is that these injuries are inevitable – that once you give up the lonely, sheltered life that Sheldon was leading, once you start engaging fully, like Francesca, with the big scary world of imagination and creation, your destruction is pre-ordained.

I don’t think that’s true; there’s a current of artistic preciousness to Jonze’s story that irritates me slightly. I don’t see the world as a harsh place where fragile free spirits are torn apart when they dare to spread their beautiful butterfly wings. Why can’t Sheldon sit Francesca down and say, Listen, you crazy bitch, I love you and all, but I’ve got a limited supply of spare parts – go easy, for chrissake? Why can’t robots throw awesome parties and build things out of papier-maché while still exercising a bit of common sense? Do passion and practicality have to be mutually exclusive?

These are the quibbles, mind you, of someone who adored the movie. On a side note, kudos to Absolut Vodka for funding Jonze’s little experiment. It was a ballsy move, and I pray that other corporate sponsors will be as forward-looking when filmmakers drop by their headquarters with kooky and dubious ideas.

M.

Reviewing John Podhoretz, movie critic for the Weekly Standard.

Note – this review contains spoilers for Watchmen (the comic and movie), J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, and Rachel Getting Married.

Watchmen – “a classic in the annals of commie claptrap”

Both comic and movie conclude with one seemingly evil superhero named Ozymandias (un peu pretentious, non?) arranging for the destruction of 25 million American lives and pinning the blame on another superhero named Dr. Manhattan. Only it turns out that the massive death Ozymandias inflicts is entirely justified because it instantly brings about peace with the Soviet Union. Russia has, you see, felt terribly threatened by the antics of the totalitarian American president Nixon, but now unites with him against the wrongly accused Dr. Manhattan. The good doctor, in turn, decides to keep quiet for the sake of the glorious world peace that has descended on the Earth, and blasts off to another galaxy where he can be a god.

(Apparently Podhoretz didn’t devote much attention to his research, because he failed to notice that in Alan Moore’s comic book, Ozymandias doesn’t pin the blame on Dr. Manhattan but on a giant extradimensional telepathic squid. But that’s a quibble.)

Podhoretz has a point. The main flaw of Watchmen – comic and movie – is the absurd ending. The Soviet Union and United States are in a tense nuclear standoff. President Nixon is in the War Room, his finger poised over the button. Is Ozymandias’ sneak attack more likely to A) cause peace to instantaneously break out, or B) make Nixon or his Russian counterpart freak out and launch an attack? A lot of nerds have complained about the absence of the squid, but the movie actually makes a bit more sense than the comic book – by destroying cities around the world, rather than singling out New York, Ozymandias is less likely to provoke a reflexive American retaliation. Still, Moore’s underlying premise that the Cold War combatants can be “scared straight” is dopey.

I’d guess the all-powerful Dr. Manhattan was intended as an allegory for Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. In the mid-80s it was plausible to worry that Reagan’s pipe dream would upset the international balance-of-power, antagonise the Soviets, and make nuclear war more likely. With hindsight, whether or not you credit Reagan’s tough talk with accelerating the collapse of communism, he certainly wasn’t the harbinger of apocalypse that his critics feared. As Podhoretz says, the Soviet regime “was already so decayed by its own evil that it collapsed only six years after Watchmen was published.” Whatever his merits as a dramatist – and I think they’re considerable – Alan Moore is no prophet.*

Star Trek – “a mess, and a disgraceful mess at that”

A gigantic alien spaceship from the future decides to rewrite history to its liking. That changes the past, but nobody seems all that interested in going back and fixing things, which is what would have happened on the show. Instead, we are asked to accept that a planet well known in Star Trek lore can be destroyed at a cost of six billion lives, and the event is simply accepted. Instead, Abrams and company also devise a deus ex machina in the form of one of the show’s most beloved characters. He won’t do anything to fix things, either, except try to turn young Kirk and young Spock into friends.

Podhoretz is being inconsistent. He writes, “Without the plot discipline that requires a time-travel scenario to leave the past as it was, the whole business just becomes a Rube Goldberg machine, with characters simply jumping backward whenever they want to make the present-day reality more appealing to them.” Then he complains because the characters don’t jump backward to make their present-day reality more appealing by preventing the destruction of Vulcan. His thinking on time-travel storytelling, in other words, is as paradoxical as the time-travel storytelling he complains about.

I think he’s just pissed off because the writers destroyed Vulcan. It pisses me off too. Not because I think the new Star Trek should adhere to the mythology established in the original series, but because it was done so fucking casually. This is six billion deaths we’re talking about. The tragedy is too enormous to be contained in a frivolous action movie.

Having the Enterprise hurdle back through a wormhole and arrive in the nick of time to save Vulcan would have been a cheap trick, and it would have stretched the movie’s already implausible storyline well past the breaking point. But on the other hand – why destroy Vulcan? What’s the point of it? As a plot device, its sole purpose is to make Spock emotionally unstable, allowing Kirk to wrest the captaincy of the Enterprise from him. You could have achieved the same effect by having the bad guy merely kill Spock’s mother. The extra six billion deaths are superfluous. This offhand genocide throws the whole movie out of whack. There’s something rotten about it.

Rachel Getting Married – “a sickly sweet multi-culti gravy”

There is so much smiling and beaming and back-slapping and haw-hawing and crying and sitar-strumming that it seems less like a wedding and more like an orthodontist convention. [Director Jonathan] Demme foolishly means us to take all of it at face value, to revel in the wonder of it all, in a spirit entirely divorced from the complexity and sophistication with which [writer Jenny] Lumet has offered her stunning depiction of a family damaged beyond repair by the costs of Kym’s addictions – and the agonizing vitality of Hathaway’s etched-in-acid portrait of a deservedly unquiet soul.

I know what Podhoretz is getting at (although I wonder exactly what kind of orthodontist he goes to). But I think it’s possible that Demme was deliberately juxtaposing the squishiness of the wedding party, a gratingly perfect “portrait of cross-cultural and cross-color harmony”, with the cynical energy of Anne Hathaway’s character. As self-absorbed, deceitful, and often unlikable as Kym is, I found myself increasingly in her corner, rolling my eyes with her at the nicey-niceyness of her family and inlaws-to-be. If the affair had been a more realistic bitchfest, full of strained silence and repressed hostility, then Kym wouldn’t have been much of a character – she would merely have been the most nightmarish attendee at a nightmarish celebration. She wins our interest, and our sympathy, by being the only human in a house full of grinning, sitar-strumming pod people.

M.

* In 2006 I wrote of another Alan Moore adaptation, V For Vendetta, that it takes place in “a world where officials murder innocents at will, where the media are complicit in spreading lies, where citizens submit docilely before a conspiracy so vast and impenetrable that it can’t be fought through elections or rallies or writing petitions, but only through blowing stuff up. This isn’t exactly our world. But we are meant to understand that it is our world.”

Drag Me To Hell – heck of an ending.

Today someone posted a snarky comment on my old review of the Kristin Scott Thomas film I’ve Loved You So Long. This caused me to re-read what I’d written, and guess what, snark or not, my opinion hasn’t changed: it’s four-fifths of a great movie, followed by one-fifth of a lousy one.

But that lousy one-fifth is right at the end; it’s what stays in your mind when you leave the theatre. It’s too bad that more websites don’t do what Slate does in its occasional feature called Spoiler Specials – that is, offer critical analysis of a recently-released film without eliding the most salient details of the plot. I would love to see a Spoiler Special on I’ve Loved You So Long – I’d be curious to see if anyone else agrees with me about the lameness of the ending.

***

Yesterday I saw another movie that you really can’t discuss without giving away how it ends – so if you haven’t seen Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell, please go away now.

Slate blogger Jonah Weiner calls the “cruel reversal” of the final scene “worthy of O. Henry”, which is maybe true, but O. Henry wouldn’t have telegraphed it quite so blatantly: imagine a version of The Gift of the Magi in which Della’s haircut is intercut with a shot of Jim standing outside a pawn shop, fingering his gold watch in a thoughtful manner.

In Drag Me To Hell, the cruel reversal in question is the substitution of Christine’s gypsy-cursed button (conveniently sealed in a plain white envelope) for a rare coin that she’d given to her boyfriend (sealed, natch, in an identical envelope). Driving home from an unsuccessful exorcism, Christine’s possessions get jumbled up with the contents of the boyfriend’s briefcase on the floor of the car; she digs around, panic-stricken, for her misplaced MacGuffin, and seizes the wrong envelope, thereby sealing her fate. Raimi makes little attempt at misdirection. From that point on it’s pretty obvious where the story has to go.

Should I deduct points for the weakness of the coin-button swap? (How would I have done it more elegantly? Perhaps there could have been a bit more uncertainty about the identity of the accursed object. What if it turned out that the button Christine thought had been dropped into her pocket by the gypsy was just an innocent spare button, while the actual cursed button had been secreted somewhere else in her clothing?) I’m not sure if the setup makes much difference. While I wish the switcheroo had been executed with a little more dexterity, I can’t think of any way that the climax could be improved on. It’s simply one of the scariest, ballsiest endings in a horror movie, ever. And then that final shot of Justin Long’s face, as his terrified gaze drifts from the scene of his girlfriend’s final moments on earth to the ticket-to-hell still clamped between his trembling fingers, and then – whammo! – cut to title. What a kicker.

M.

That sex scene in “Watchmen”.

I’ve read some carping about that sex scene – you know the scene I mean, with Nite Owl and Silk Spectre getting it on hovercraft-style to the strains of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

We’ve just seen Nite Owl’s alter ego, mild-mannered Dan Dreiberg, fail to maintain his hard-on when Silk Spectre, or rather her alter ego Laurie Juspeczyk, attempted to seduce him in the living room of his bachelor pad. They take a sad little nap on the sofa instead. A few hours later, after they throw on their costumes and save some kids from a burning building, Dan’s mojo is magically restored. Soon they’re screwing by moonlight in his owl-shaped hovercraft floating above the clouds. At the peak of her ecstasy, Laurie’s elbow bumps a button on the console, and the ship’s flamethrower erupts in a spurt of flame, which we see from the perspective of the mere mortals in the city below:

Father, what is that strange glow in the sky?

That’s the gods, having an orgasm.

Hell yeah it’s silly. It’s silly when superheroes have sex.

I think it’s a pretty good scene. Still, the carping gets at the fundamental problem with Watchmen, the movie: we’re never allowed sufficient space to step back and critically evaluate these heroes and their absurd self-mythologising. In the comic, when Nite Owl puts on his costume for the first time in a decade, his middle-aged paunch hangs over his utility belt. When the vigilante Rorschach is taken down by the cops, they chortle at his elevator shoes. Aside from the godlike powers of Doctor Manhattan, we never see any of the heroes exhibit more-than-ordinarily-human abilities. They’re just people in funny costumes.

Now Rorschach’s elevator shoes are gone, and so is Nite Owl’s paunch. The very first scene has the Comedian and a shadowy assailant punching through walls and tossing each other back and forth like – well, like superheroes. The fight scenes extend and elaborate on situations sketched out in the comic, but these are Hollywood fights, with all the attendant glamour and gruesomeness – the crisp-vegetable crunch of breaking bones, bodies pinwheeling through the air, the combatants reacting faster, hitting harder, and leaping higher than anyone does in real life. We’re not watching the Watchmen. We’re inside their adolescent superhero fantasies, watching them watch themselves. But by aggrandizing its heroes, the film has made them less sad, less interesting, less human – less in every way. And that’s why, as awesome as it frequently is, the movie disappoints.

M.

Let The Right One In.

There’s something funny about the girl who just moved into the apartment next door. She doesn’t go to school. She doesn’t wear a jacket even though it’s the middle of winter. She smells funny and her stomach is always growling. When we get a look inside her apartment we find that it’s devoid of furniture.

Our hero, Oskar, an awkward twelve-year-old boy growing up in a drab suburb of Stockholm, arrives at the logical conclusion. “Are you poor?” he asks his new friend.

Well…not exactly.

Let The Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) is an unusual horror story. Yes, there’s blood and death and dismemberment. But that’s nothing, the film suggests, next to the horror of being twelve. You’re skinny and you look ridiculous in your gym shorts. The other boys at school torment you because you’re a little smarter than they are. Grown-ups are clueless, yet your life is subject to their whims. All that’s bad enough. But what if you were twelve forever?

The girl next door, Eli, has been stuck on the cusp of adolescence for a long, long time; how long, she can’t or won’t say. She’s seen and done things that her gormless new neighbour has only dreamt of. And yet, for all her experience, Eli comes across as an innocent kid acting tough. When she makes friends with Oskar, is drawn into (or draws him into?) a chastely romantic relationship, are we to view her as a lonely girl surprised by long-forgotten hormonal stirrings? Or as a wizened old predator seeking young flesh? The movie sustains the first reading but hints strongly at the second, as when, eerily, the adorable young actress who plays Eli, Lina Leandersson, is replaced for a moment or two by a similar-looking but much older woman.

I can’t recommend this film enough, and yet I’m reluctant to write more about it because I don’t want to give anything away. I should mention that the climax is the most extraordinarily economical “action” setpiece I’ve ever seen. It’s a long static shot with Oskar’s face filling most of the frame; the violence takes place offscreen, with only the intrusion of a couple bloody props to show what’s happening, and yet it’s so well choreographed (and the sound design is so perfect) that we know exactly what’s going on, and it fills us with a combination of vengeful glee and bone-deep dread. I can’t explain it better than that. Go see the movie.

***

If you’ve already seen Let The Right One In, you may read on.

***

One thing that I missed, which my viewing companions pointed out afterward, is that there is “something funny” about the crotch shot. As you’ll recall, this is the moment when Oskar peeks in on Eli as she’s changing into a clean dress. As she pulls the dress down, Oskar gets a momentary view of her uncovered crotch.

Maybe I’m blind, but all I saw between her legs was a dark patch which I assumed was a tuft of pubic hair. Oskar’s reaction – he ducks away from the doorway, eyes wide – is consistent with the behaviour of a twelve-year-old boy who’s just seen his first naked girl. But my fellow filmgoers insisted that Oskar had seen something besides pubic hair. Something like a scar.

I did a little research on various message boards, which led me to the following interview by Karin Badt with the director, Tomas Alfredson. It’s a good interview which I encourage you to read in its entirety, but I’ll pull out the relevant quotes:

I tried to do a flashback scene, where we see the castration of Eli [the girl vampire] two hundred years ago, with very close shots of a knife coming close to skin, starting to cut, and I said to the make-up guys that I want to do this. They said you can’t do this unless it is real animal, because if you are so close to the camera, you can’t use rubber or special effects, so I said okay, let’s do that then, then I forgot about it, and the assistant director said, we have the pig here now. I said, what pig? The pig for the cutting shot. A living pig. He is outside together with the slaughterer. So I went outside the studio and a butcher was standing with his knife, and this pig looking with his sad eyes. I said no. I wouldn’t be able to sleep if we killed him. That’s bad karma.

And:

The script is based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist. I wrote it with a screenwriter: he wrote and I added structure. I cut the novel to only one track: the love story. What makes it unusual is that it is a love story with no sex, with a castrated boy.

I’m glad that Alfredson decided not to kill the pig, and I’m glad that the castration scene was left out. In fact, knowing now what it signifies, I wish the crotch shot had been left out, too. But perhaps the director thought that he’d already deviated far enough from the novel and that the author would blow his top if the film elided the non-trivial detail of Eli’s transgenderedness.

Now that I look back I can see that this detail was suggested elsewhere, most explicitly in the scene where Eli asks Oskar “Would you still like me if I wasn’t a girl?” (It’s possible to assume that she’s only hinting that she’s not a human girl.) But I can’t help feeling that the crotch shot – so quick and dim that a lot of viewers, like me, are going to miss the point entirely – is either too much or too little. Take it out, and readers of the book can still pick up on the other hints and nudge each other knowingly. If it’s left in, a bit more explanation is wanted.

***

Judging from the descriptions of the plot I’ve picked up here and there, the novel Let The Right One In is a lot less ambiguous and a lot more lurid than the movie. For instance, in the novel the character of Håkan, the old guy whom Eli is living with at the beginning, is a pedophile. In an interview with the website Icons of Fright, Alfredson explains that this information was left out of the film because if the theme of pedophilia were introduced, given the prurient fascination it would attract, it would overwhelm the story and crowd out the central relationship between the two kids.

To my mind, if Håkan were definitively portrayed as a pedophile it would upset the disturbing symmetry of the narrative. What made the film especially poignant to me was the realisation that Håkan, presumably, had started out like Oskar, as a “childhood” crush of Eli’s. The question left unresolved (beautifully) by the ending was, did Eli cynically manipulate Oskar into the now-empty role of factotum? Or was her loneliness and neediness genuine? Not that the one answer precluded the other. (Now, having read these interviews with Alfredson, I realise that this is not necessarily the “correct” interpretation, i.e., the one the director intended.)

Now, if Håkan were a pedophile – or to be more precise, someone who was initially drawn to Eli sexually rather than having been in love with her from an early age – the Håkan-Oskar symmetry would be destroyed. Håkan would become a mere monster instead of a tragic figure, Eli would become merely a victim, and Oskar merely her saviour. I find this gloss on the story less satisfying not because I’d rather think of Eli as evil and Oskar as doomed, but because I’d rather not know for sure: I’d rather be free to wish.

M.

Update, Mar 21 2009: The Onion AV Club has just put up a Book Vs. Film discussion by Tasha Robinson that gets into the plot of the novel in some detail. Her post ratifies my suspicion that the novel is “a lot less ambiguous and a lot more lurid than the movie”:

[W]here the book is a well-told but conventional horror story, the film is more unconventional. Its long silences and chilly tone summon up dread better than the book’s grotesque descriptions of pedophile vampires.

Now I have another question. Robinson writes that “knowing the author was behind the screenplay helped” her to come to the conclusion that she preferred the movie to the book. John Ajvide Lindqvist is the credited screenwriter for Let The Right One In. Why, then, does the director, in the interview I quoted above, say, “The script is based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist. I wrote it with a screenwriter: he wrote and I added structure”?

If Alfredson actually wrote the movie himself (with a collaborator) it would explain the huge differences in tone between book and screenplay. But you can’t argue with that screenwriter credit. Anyone have an explanation?

Southland Tales.

I think Richard Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko is a spoof. Yeah, I’m pretty sure.

How do I explain Southland Tales? It’s not a plot that lends itself to summarisation. It feels like a condensed version of some much longer, not necessarily better story in another medium. Maybe that’s why I was reminded of David Lynch’s Dune, which I suspect was also a spoof.

We’re in Los Angeles. It’s the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, in an alternate reality where World War III is in full swing and a beefed-up Patriot Act has put soldiers on every street corner and videocameras in every public washroom. Some anti-government rebels calling themselves Neo-Marxists are working to blackmail the Republican vice-presidential candidate, whose son-in-law, a movie star played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, is having an affair with a famous musician / porn star / talk show host played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. The Rock has amnesia. And he’s written a screenplay that may foretell the end of the world. Meanwhile Seann William Scott is a guy pretending to be a cop who, I think, is trying to find his identical twin, who actually is a cop…is that right? Only it turns out either that they’re both cops or that neither one is a cop, I can’t tell which. They’re both tied up in the blackmail scheme somehow. Only there are actually multiple blackmail schemes that turn out to be part of a larger scheme, possibly involving a perpetual motion machine and Wallace Shawn in a cape.

Justin Timberlake is peddling an experimental super-drug that makes you think you’re in a music video with hot nurses. One of the identical twin cops is explaining that he hasn’t had a bowel movement in six days – this may turn out to be important. The Rock is imitating Barack Obama for some reason. Now he’s doing Woody Allen in Bananas. Now he’s being all suave and dangerous like a secret agent. Wait, has he still got amnesia? Who is he talking to? Why is he back with his wife again? Where did he get that secret code?

Oy, is this silly! It’s possible if I watched it again I could tease out a few answers, but I strongly suspect that no amount of probing will induce Southland Tales to give up all its mysteries. Two or three fragments of coherent narrative will occasionally drift into contact and for a moment you’ll think that you’re on a solid footing. Then the fragments jumble apart and you just have to drift along with the flow. It’s kind of fun anyway. How fun? Let’s just say the finale involves a zeppelin, a flying ice cream truck, a rift in the space-time continuum, and The Rock and Sarah Michelle Gellar dancing in evening wear.

I recommend you watch Southland Tales on DVD while doing something else, like solving a Sudoku. Every few minutes the movie will catch your attention and you’ll look up and say, “Wow, that was really weird.” It’s possible that there are additional rewards to be gleaned by attempting to follow the plot, but I doubt it’s worth the trouble.

Yes, I’m virtually certain it’s a spoof.

M.

Some movies I’ve seen.

When I started blogging “regularly” a couple months ago, it was my intention to write at least a paragraph or two about every book I read. But you’ll notice my book-related output has fallen off dramatically. It’s not that I’ve stopped reading – it’s that for over a month I’ve been diligently plowing my way through Jacques Barzun’s 800-page social history, From Dawn To Decadence. I’m still only up to the mid-19th century. I did take a couple breaks to read The Catcher In The Rye and Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal; my thoughts on the latter will be incorporated, maybe, into a long-postponed essay on the Roth canon.

Meanwhile I go to the movies – not necessarily to “serious” ones. My thoughts below are organised according to no principle except that I happened to see all these flicks in the last few weeks.

***

The X-Files: I Want To Believe.

At the drugstore downstairs where I rent DVDs for 99 cents a pop, the woman behind the counter made a face when she saw the new X-Files movie in my hands. “I paid full price for that in the theatre,” she said. “Just be glad you’re only paying ninety-nine cents.”

I’d seen the snarky reviews and I didn’t have high hopes for this, but I was curious to see it anyway. I loved the show in its heyday, though I have to admit I didn’t pay much attention during the final season, when Scully had Mulder’s baby, Mulder went on the lam, and I can’t even remember what the hell happened to those substitute agents played by Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish. I never saw the final episode.

I thought it was a good sign when they announced that the new movie would be a self-contained adventure, detached from the alien colonisation conspiracy. I never cared much for the conspiracy episodes anyway. All that clunkily portentous dialogue delivered by interchangeable bad guys in rooms with the blinds closed. And the more you found out about the conspiracy, the more ridiculous it seemed. How many different types of aliens and alien-human hybrids were there anyway?

By the last few seasons I was tuning in mainly for the standalone episodes. Remember when Mulder and Scully were absorbed by a giant, hallucinogenic, subterranean fungus? How about the Groundhog Day episode where Mulder kept dying in the same bank-robbery-gone-awry? Or the episode where Robert Patrick’s character got eaten and regurgitated by a disease-curing backwoods mutant? Or the one where Annabeth Gish found herself trapped in a hospital floating in a featureless void? These were straight-up Twilight Zone concepts, and they were great – surprising, creepy, often funny, and mercifully free of ambiguously sinister conversations among men in grey suits.

The first half-hour of I Want To Believe is pretty promising. Billy Connolly as a psychic priest is leading a police search team across a frozen field. He drops to his knees and starts digging in the snow. And up comes a severed arm. This all somehow has to do with the abduction of a female FBI agent by creepy Russians. Mulder and Scully, private citizens now, are called in by the FBI to lend their expertise. There’s a foxy agent played by Amanda Peet who seems to take a shine to Mulder, despite the fact that he’s got a scruffy beard and looks like a bunker-dwelling conspiracy nut. Which, it appears, he now is.

This is all done pretty well. And if the solution to the severed arm mystery winds up being a little silly, well, the solutions to these mysteries usually are. The problem is – this isn’t a spoiler, I don’t think – Mulder and Scully are a couple now. They’re living together out in the boonies somewhere. She’s a doctor in a Catholic hospital and he’s, like I said, a bearded nut. We see them in bed together. He rolls over and nuzzles her cheek and she says, “Ooh, scratchy beard.” It all just feels wrong. Maybe if I’d paid more attention during that final season, this would seem like more of a natural development. But at the end of the movie, when our heroes share a loving kiss, it sort of made me wince, like I was watching Sherlock Holmes make out with Dr. Watson. What I mean is that this new relationship doesn’t fit with my idea of who the characters are. I always thought of the agents as loving each other but never actually, you know, loving each other.

Is it narrow-minded of me to wish that things could go back to the way they were in 1998 or so? At the end of the day, after escaping from the psychedelic fungus, our heroes should return to their separate apartments, climb into their beds alone, and prepare for the next day’s adventure. Maybe I prefer character stasis to growth for the same reason that I preferred the standalone episodes to the slowly-unfolding conspiracy. I can’t explain it.

Anyway, the snarky reviews are about right. I Want To Believe is a moderately good X-Files episode unaccountably stretched out to feature length. Seems like it would have been easier to just put in on TV as A Very Special X-Files Reunion.

***

When I popped in the I Want To Believe DVD, I was faced with a dilemma: did I want to watch the theatrical cut, or the extended cut with deleted scenes? This is more choice than I want to deal with, when watching what I fully expect to be a mediocre movie. I’d have no difficulty choosing the director’s cut over the theatrical version of, say, Gangs of New York, but when I’m settling down to watch something like this, or Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, there’s really no reason to assume that the longer version will be any better. Just the contrary, actually. And yet, when given the choice, I always go with the extended cut. I’d hate to think I was missing anything.

***

The Day the Earth Stood Still, again.

Without getting too deep into the details of the plot, the 1951 version of The Day The Earth Stood Still is about an alien visitor, Klaatu, who comes to earth to warn us to get rid of our nuclear weapons. In the 2008 version, Klaatu is here to chastise us about global warming. In both versions, we’re meant to sympathise with the alien and his mission, but instead I find myself wishing to see him, and the Galactic Overlords whom he represents, get taken down a peg.

In the original film, while Klaatu learned about humanity during the course of his visit, his outlook didn’t change; he was the same omniscient Jesus at the beginning as he was at the end. The new Klaatu has a bit more of a dramatic arc. Actually, he’s kind of pissy. He arrives in New York (rather than Washington, as in the original) because he wants to meet with the world’s leaders at the United Nations. We never find out what he was going to tell them, though, because before he can take five steps out of his glowing energy-ball spaceship he gets shot by a trigger-happy soldier. Whatever he was going to say in his big UN speech, I guess he decides to skip it, because he proceeds immediately to Plan B: wipe out all life on the planet to save it from our carbon-spewing ways.

Seems a bit excessive, right? Klaatu’s explanation makes a certain amount of sense: there are only a handful of worlds, it seems, that have the precise conditions that allow for life to develop. The Galactic Overlords can’t allow us to fuck up the planet permanently, so they’ve decided to scrub us out and let evolution start again from scratch. You’d think if they’d been watching over us all the while, they could’ve dropped by a little earlier to say, “Hey, guys, enough with the carbon, or we’ll have to kill you all.” But if Klaatu is Jesus, his Overlords are Yahweh-like in their heavy-handedness. They swing abruptly from benign neglect to crushing judgement.

The filmmakers are conscious of the Biblical overtones. Klaatu, like Jesus, has the power to heal the sick and raise the dead; and the instrument with which humanity will be destroyed is a plague of minuscule, voracious metal locusts. But the book of prophecy that The Day The Earth Stood Still most resembles is The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – the early chapters, where the earth is scheduled for destruction on a bureaucratic whim. Klaatu responds to Jennifer Connelly’s pleas to save the human race with the classic evasions of a mid-level functionary: It’s out of my hands, the decision has already been made, the process has already begun. I’m not sure of the precise timeline, but it seems like Klaatu’s only here for, like, two days. Really, Overlords? This is the only opportunity we get to present our case? Whether we live or die depends on the whim of this one alien? What if instead of having that attractive Jennifer Connelly and her plucky adopted kid to show him around and introduce him to human emotions, Klaatu had wound up in the company of some racist redneck, or worse yet some misanthropic environmentalist who kept whining about how the world would be better off if humans would give up breeding and voluntarily go extinct?

I guess this is a sign of my under-evolved human intellect, but if Klaatu ever did drop by to pass judgement on humanity, I’d be strongly tempted to tell him and his Galactic Overlords to go take a flying leap. (Not coincidentally, I feel much the same way about Jesus and Yahweh.)

***

Stuart Gordon’s Stuck.

Someday maybe I’ll write an essay on the career of Stuart Gordon. For almost thirty years he’s been grinding out movies – mostly horror and sci-fi – that are just a little too cheap and grisly for wide theatrical release, but too well-crafted to be dismissed with all the other direct-to-video crap on the shelves. In the last couple years Gordon has made a cheap and grisly (but highly effective) version of the forgotten David Mamet play Edmond, elevated by the presence of Mamet regulars William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon; and now the cheap and grisly Stuck, with Stephen Rea.

Rea is a homeless guy who, pushing his shopping cart across the street one night, gets hit by a car. His legs shattered by the impact, Rea flies up into the windshield and winds up stuck headfirst in the shattered glass, pinned in place by the arm of the windshield wiper piercing his guts. The driver, just returned from a night of pills and boozing at a nearby nightclub, is a young nurse played by Mena Suvari. In a panic, the only-slightly-too-stupid-to-believe Suvari drives home, with Rea’s bloody face dripping onto her passenger seat and his legs waving helplessly above the hood. She parks the car in her garage, tells the semi-conscious Rea “I’m going to get help,” and heads inside to obliterate the memory with more pills, more booze, and a long screwing by her drug-dealer boyfriend. The next day, Suvari takes a cab to work, leaving Rea still stuck in the windshield, fully awake now, and with her cellphone tantalisingly just out of reach…

Gordon is never subtle – not in his blood-n-guts, not in his tits-n-ass, and not in his sociology. Suvari, with her unflattering cornrows and broad acne-spotted forehead, her pills and booze, and her desperate concern not to rock the boat at her hellish job, is the personification of lumpenproletariat vulgarity and self-absorption. Rea, meanwhile, is the Good Poor, condescended to by social workers, moved along by a cop when he tries to nap on a park bench, friendless except for a fellow bum who loans him his shopping cart. Actually, Rea is the first Stuart Gordon protagonist I can think of who is almost entirely sympathetic. Even so, when he momentarily gets the upper hand on Suvari, his cruelty flashes out.

I have no doubt that left-wing reviewers of this film will choose to interpret it as an allegory of how capitalism pits the poor against the poor. Maybe that’s what it is. But in my view, Gordon’s outlook is deeply conservative. It’s not the System that oppresses his protagonists, it’s other humans: awful, awful humans. The Gordon universe is one of unhappy people, screwed by other unhappy people, screwing back reflexively. You don’t walk out of one of his films wishing to save the world. You come out wishing that, like Klaatu, you could unleash a plague of tiny metal locusts to wipe us out and start fresh.

M.

Kristin Scott Thomas, continued.

Without even meaning to, I took immediate action on my New Year’s resolution to explore the French-language films of Kristin Scott Thomas. Turns out she has a supporting role in the thriller Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne).

Last week I kvetched that people overrated 2008′s other Kristin Scott Thomas film because it “benefited from the European cinema’s reputation for profundity”. By contrast, Tell No One is a great piece of popular entertainment whose North American commercial prospects were sabotaged by its restriction to the art-house ghetto. The middle third of the film is as pulse-pounding as a Jason Bourne adventure. I thought it had echoes of Marathon Man, although maybe that’s just because of the many scenes of François Cluzet, who looks a lot like Dustin Hoffman, running. In synopsis Tell No One most closely resembles The Fugitive, with its everyman hero – like Richard Kimble, a doctor – wanted by the cops for the murder of his wife. Except the wife may or may not actually be dead.

My one quibble is that the tension dissipates a little too early. The final act is dedicated to wrapping up the convoluted plot, and although by the end everything is neat and tidy, I could’ve lived with a loose end or two if it had meant one more scene featuring the vulpine Mikaela Fisher as a terrifyingly imperturbable torturess – one of the great screen henchmen in recent memory. Other supporting actors make strong impressions – Gilles Lelouche as an honourable thug from the banlieues who comes to the aid of our hero, François Berléand as an obsessive-compulsive detective, and Nathalie Baye as a defense attorney who entertainingly dresses down a cocky DA. The latter two actors seem to be pretty big in France, and it’s depressing how much sifting of Google Image results I had to conduct to match the actors’ names from IMDB.com to their roles; the English-language internet is still pretty indifferent to foreigners, even movie stars.

***

In my spoiler-filled evaluation of I’ve Loved You So Long, I complained that “For ninety minutes, [the main character] is a mystery. Then she’s a martyr…It’s a huge letdown.” I suppose this thought requires further clarification.

On the weekend I went to see Ricky Gervais in Ghost Town, which doesn’t really demand analysis – it’s simply a fun, schmaltzy romantic comedy. Gervais is a misanthrope who shies from human interaction, until a near-death experience on the operating table leaves him with the ability to talk to ghosts. Unfortunately, the ghosts are lonely, and pretty soon they won’t leave him alone. As he reluctantly helps the ghosts resolve the unfinished business that keeps them trapped on our material plane, Gervais learns to be a better, more generous person.

Gervais’ social phobia is explained away as a reaction to a traumatic breakup, and of course it’s cured by a simple act of will: he resolves to start paying attention to other people’s problems. This is a typical Hollywood oversimplification. I have a long history of interpersonal ineptitude, and I can assure the reader that it can’t be cured just by deciding to be a nicer guy. First off, people’s definition of what constitutes “niceness” is hugely variable. What one guy defines as an appropriate curiosity about his affairs, another guy resents as intolerable nosiness. Secondly, non-verbal cues like eye contact and body language are to a depressing extent resistant to our conscious control. An attempted friendly overture to an acquaintance can be undermined by a hostile-seeming physical pose or an ill-timed flicking away of the eyes. Thirdly, making small talk with strangers is not something that comes easily to someone who’s lost the habit. Believe me, I’ve thought about this stuff. It’s complicated.

I guess I could have been put off by Ghost Town‘s simplistic view of human behaviour. But it’s a fantasy, after all. If I’m willing to accept the notion that Manhattan’s streets are crowded with unhappy ghosts, I’ll play along with the illusion that people can so easily change for the better.

I’ve Loved You So Long is irritating because it seems to promise a more nuanced view of how people behave. Throughout the film people act in baffling, troubling, contradictory ways. But in the end, it turns out that there’s a single, Ghost Town-like explanation for all the main character’s actions. Maybe I’d be more charitable if I could force myself to see I’ve Loved You So Long as the Gothic mystery it wants to be, rather than the realistic drama it pretends to be. If you replaced Kristin Scott Thomas with Joan Crawford, moved the action from a middle-class French neighbourhood to a creepy mansion, and had the climactic revelation occur during a thunderstorm, I’d probably think the ending was pretty awesome. As it is, I still kinda hate it.

M.