I really like this passage from Julia Turner’s Slate piece on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

[J.K. Rowling is] not using Harry to make points about terrorism. She’s using terrorism to make points about Harry. Rowling culls the scariest elements of modern life and uses them as a kind of shorthand, a quick way to instill fear.

I hadn’t thought about it in that exact way before, but I think it describes the situation perfectly. I think the thing that has most intrigued me about the series as it’s gone on is the way the mechanics of Voldemort and his minions the Death Eaters have slowly transformed from nebulous fantasy-stock Dark Lordisms to real down-and-dirty hands-on torture and, especially, murder. As compelling as Tolkien’s Sauron is, there’s something impersonal in his grand-scale plottings and massive armies; Voldemort, on the other hand, has his cult members break into houses, schools, and government offices and execute people. I think Rowling likely went this route because unlike most fantasy villains, Voldemort does not control territory, not even a castle or fortress. Quite like terrorist cells or organized crime gangs, he and his followers are everywhere and nowhere, and when they strike, it’s with individuated strikes against civilians. It’s wetwork.

Haunted houses, werewolves, demons, Dracula, and lots and lots of zombies: Genre-based fictionblogging is where it’s at. Lately I’ve found a couple of sites to add to that roster:

Velvet Marauder, a long-running semi-parodic superhero blog run by David Campbell, proprietor of the deservedly popular comics humor site Dave’s Long Box;

and Siege Mentality, a new zombie blog by Crobuzon that appears, if Crobuzon’s comment at my zombie blog The Outbreak is any indication, to be operating in the fictional world I’ve already established. Neat! I’m curious to see where he goes with things–most zombie blogs tilt to a far more survivalist slant than I’ve given my own, and indeed the mechanics of the zombie outbreak I’m chronicling were designed to reflect this preference.

Finally, on an unrelated topic, David Edelstein at Slate defends the right of Steven Spielberg–of genre, really–to tackle real-life tragedy. (He also rejects screenwriter David Koepp’s interpretation of the film’s politics. (Hey, the horrorblogosphere today, the poliblogosphere tomorrow!)) In one passage he echoes what I’ve been telling people who ask about the movie:

[War of the Worlds] has more in common with Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan than with Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park.

And he even throws in the horror-fan CW that Night of the Living Dead is one of the best depictions of late-’60s turmoil ever made. We’ve come a long way, baby!

Spoilers galore. Highlight to read.

So, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I’m not sure what to make of Snape killing Dumbledore, as well as Malfoy actually being a Death Eater-in-training. Despite the fact that the formula of the series (see link here) is “Harry spends a few hundred pages being told he’s wrong, but then in the end it turns out that he’s right and everybody else is wrong,” I STILL thought they were just hitting the whole “Snape is still a Death Eater and Draco’s up to no good! Seriously! Listen!” thing too hard for it to be totally borne out–esp. when Harry’s obsession with Draco’s supposed malfeasance starts distracting him from the supposedly more important mission regarding Slughorn’s memory that Dumbledore had assigned him. But lo and behold, Harry is once again shown to be right and everyone else was wrong to have doubted him. I can’t tell if this is supposed to be taken at face value or not–if the former, then to be frank the writing is a little weak. But then I’ve always thought that about these books. I mean, the big prophecy that we spend the whole last book trying to figure out is that Harry and Voldemort are bound by fate to confront each other, and one will destroy the other? No shit, Sherlock! (see link here)

And how about that Spider-Man movie ending, with Harry breaking up with Ginny “for her own good”? Many comics critics hate the whole “my superherodom causes the women in my life to suffer–how awful for me!” thing because it uses the suffering of women as a means toward supposedly making the men more interesting, rather than treating women as people in their own right for whom their own suffering means more than a character-building exercise for the super-men in their lives–but now here’s the biggest author in the world, who happens to be a woman, doing the exact same thing!

Well, duh. This page just happens to convey this more literally than usual.

Zombiewood brings you graphically, convincingly zombified renditions of big Hollywood celebrities, through the magic of photoshop.

Note one: I posted that Willem Defoe one because it’s the least likely to freak out people who might not want to see this sort of thing–trust me, they get a lot worse, and therefore a lot better, than that. Halle Berry and Charlize Theron are truly stunning.

Note two: The link leads you just to the most recent of several rounds of zombie-celeb pics–use that “View Related Contests” togglebar and feat your eyes.

I think this is some very creepy stuff. Thank you, Internet.

I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in any of the bands at the Siren Festival this year. Take your dull hipster rock and shove it, man.

The best dance band in the world (maybe the best anything band in the world, acutally), Underworld, has a new song out. It’s stunning, but then you knew that it would be.

(Link courtesy of One Louder.)

J. Donelson of the excellent comics blog the Pickytarian directs us, almost unwittingly it would seem, to the fine horror-tinged work of his wife, artist Amy Talluto. Check out this series of transmogrified pin-up poses (complete with double-entendre postcard taglines) in which the bathing beauties have been replaced with average-sized women. Well, with their bodies, at least. Their heads are nowhere to be found. Talluto’s statement on the series emphasizes the drawings’ critique of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue aesthetic, but that could have been accomplished simply through the self-portraiture aspect of the project; chop those heads off and you’ve got a new, violent, eerie animal on your hands. Take a look.

Two comics-related items of note that I’m reasonably sure I can talk about:

1) The final (I think?) piece I wrote for The Comics Journal before taking my current job, my review of Paradise Kiss, is featured in issue #269, which came out this week. It’s the long-anticipated shoujo manga issue, so do check it out.

2) Partyka‘s Matt Wiegle was once again kindly enough to draw a comic I wrote. The result, deceptively entitled “Pornography” though it’s quite safe for work, can now be found here. I hope you enjoy it; perhaps you’ll check out the other comics I’ve written as well.

In response to the bit in my Land of the Dead review where I discuss the zombie’s comparative lack of vampire-style formal conventions (wooden stakes, sucking blood, nocturnal, that sort of thing), Tom Collins has decided to show me up by creating an absurdly comprehensive post chronicling just how many variations both the vampire and zombie myths have in the movies. Truly a masterpiece of linkblogging.

Courtesy of the indispensable Bryan Alexander comes a project close to my heart: a werewolf blog. That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout, people. Actually, I haven’t read much of it yet, but flipping through the final few entries I appreciate that the blog doesn’t really have an ending in the style of a traditional narrative; the writer understands that blogging is not just writing a novel in daily installments.

Shhhh, big secret: I’ve never seen a single Italian zombie movie. Not even Zombi 2, for pete’s sake! (And I’ve also only ever seen one giallo—Deep Red. My Italo-tyro status is one of the things that make me a lousy horror fan.) So I’m happy to hear (from Steven at Corpse Eaters) that all of the Tombs of the Blind Dead movies are coming out on DVD. They sound nice and hideous.

Finally, file this under horror in unexpected places: “Four Kicks,” the latest video by hipster redneck-rockers Kings of Leon. Previously best known for their dubious insistence that they’ve never listened to Creedence Clearwater Revival, they’re likely to make quite a splash with the graphically violent brawl depicted here. The video’s innovation is to freeze the action whenever the lead singer is singing, allowing the viewer to see brightly lit close-ups on a woman’s face just before it’s about to be pounded with the butt of a fire extinguisher, or an exploded lamp the second after it’s been smashed over a man’s head. Unfortunately I can’t find a nice-and-easy permalink to direct you to–RCA’s music video page appears to be one where old videos are cleared away to make room for new ones, Kings of Leon’s official website is all Flash so I can’t actually link directly to their video page, and in a display of fuckheadery typical for the network, MTV.com’s copy of the video is not Mac-compatible. But it won’t take you more than five seconds to find the video either of the first two sites. Note that I actually recommend you watch the Real video version rather than the Quicktime one–even in hi res, the QT video is a blurry mess. Check it out, and if you like what you see keep your eyes peeled for it on your better music-video TV shows for a crystal-clear version.

…deep in the throes of San Diego Deprivation Syndrome…

…need infusion of panel discussions, $4 water, and shopping spree at the Comic Relief and Bud Plant booths STAT…

Well, at least I’m learning something: This is the last time I’ll miss an SDCC.

Jon Hastings has posted a brief rejoinder to my review of War of the Worlds. The gist of Jon’s new post is that no, Spielberg fully intended that “happy ending” to be a straightforward, honest-to-god happy ending, and has said as much about similar scenes in other films he’s made. In that case I’ll take back what I said about Spielberg’s intent to make a happy ending so unearned and tacked-on that it serves as a backhanded critique of happy endings–but that don’t mean that that ain’t how it ends up reading! If Spielberg truly felt that audiences would cheerily buy the father-and-child reunion at the end of WotW, he really needs someone to sit him down and explain some things to him. I’m still not 100% convinced he wasn’t aware of what he was doing–those musical cues are key, methinks–but hey, food for thought.

And also hey, I certainly think this tactic is a flaw in his filmmaking because it’s basically superfluous, but it’s an interesting flaw to me, rather than an infuriating one. And it may well make his movies more, not less, compelling as art, if not as narratives.

I would also like to second Jon’s motion that Spielberg giving the people what he thinks they want is no more or less contrived than Lars Von Trier giving the people what he thinks they need–which is a roundabout way of Lars Von Trier giving them what he wants, and what he thinks they deserve.

Steven Spielberg is one of the most fascinating Hollywood directors, because he’s probably the one filmmaker whose own preferences and techniques dictate those of Hollywood itself. That’s why, whether we’re talking about Saving Private Ryan, A.I., Minority Report, or the film I saw the other night, War of the Worlds, I think it’s unfair to deried his now-trademark unearned happy endings as pandering to Hollywood values. After all, over the past 30 years, Hollywood values have become whatever Steven Spielberg wants them to be.

And if the spate of large-scale genre films listed above is any indication, what he wants them to be are bleak, disturbing, and viciously cruel almost–almost–to the point of relentlessness. In the past, I’ve argued that what holds him back from going full-scale Texas Chain Saw-nihilist on us is his belief (endlessly derided by his critics, though not in so many words) that humanity isn’t a giant pile of shit. If there’s an explanation other than a trendy love of cynicism for why people could compare the brutal yet ultimately optimistic Private Ryan unfavorably to the unending parades of cheesy war-movie cliches that were Platoon and The Thin Red Line, I’d love to hear it. At any rate it’s tough to argue that the happy endings of the aforementioned Spielberg films send people walking way from the theater whistling a happy tune; if anything, they’re the micron of sugar that helps the extremely nasty medicine go down.

But I think there’s something extra brutal about War of the Worlds, in that the ending feels so tacked on and gratuitous and unearned that the redemptive flavor of the Spielberg “and they lived, if not happily, then well ever after” ending is lost. In part this is due to Spielberg’s fealty to H.G. Wells’ original ending, the happy patness of which only serves to reinforce humanity’s impotence against the alien onslaught that the book concerns itself with. But even moreso, it’s due to the gruesomeness of what’s come before. And I’m not just talking about the actions of the aliens, with their disintegration beams and human fertilizer. Mainly what I’m talking about is the man who bashes a hole in the rear window of the Ferrier family’s stolen SUV, then begins tearing the glass apart with his bare, bloody hands.

In other words, and playing firmly against type, Spielberg is giving us an apocalypse movie where the apocalypse brings out the worst in people, rather than the best.

This concept that is fascinating to me, as you might have guessed. We all want to believe that our post-armageddon character arcs would run something like Jake Weber’s in the Dawn of the Dead remake. But for me the truly terrifying element of apocalyptic horror is not (just) the genre-driven mechanics of the apocalypse itself–be it extraterrestrial, viral, avian, or undead in nature–but the nagging fear that if faced with such circumstances I’d be a lot more like Barbara in Night of the Living Dead, or Kaufman or Cholo in Land of the Dead, or the guys who set up the mobile rape camp in the novel version of The Stand. The fear that I’d fall to pieces, or become a barbarian. The fear that I can’t hack it.

In War of the Worlds, we’re presented with lots of people who can’t hack it. Foremost among them, I would argue, is Tom Cruise’s character, Ray Ferrier. Many have argued that Spielberg heroicizes this everyman simply through his casting choice, which is an understandable argument, but I daresay that Cruise’s sudden outbreak of inanity-slash-insanity over the past few months helped his character rather than hurt him. When Cruise is asked to play an asshole incapable of behaving responsibly, it’s suddenly a lot easier to believe the result.

From the moment the alien attack erupts, Spielberg and Cruise give Ray a consistently self-interested behavior pattern. Beyond the desire to protect his children–a desire so tough to shake among non-sociopaths that it hardly qualifies as heroism, especially here–Ray’s actions are never outside the box of basic flight-or- well, flight; as society breaks down around him, he’s really more than willing to participate in that breakdown, as is established from the moment he (wisely) steals the minivan from the mechanic and (also wisely) refuses to pick up any of the thousands of stranded humans he drives past. He’s also shown failing on any number of occasions–he orders his son to quickly pack some food, but all the son can find in Ray’s bachelor pad are condiments; he lets his son drive the van while he himself gets some shut-eye but fails to instruct the kid to keep well clear of people; his whole plan–to travel to Boston and rendez-vous with his ex-wife, her current husband, and her parents–is a mixture of fairy-tale wishful thinking and an inarticulated desire to fob off the responsibility for his children on their more capable caregiver. (When his son calls him on this last bit, Ray gets upset, but does not deny it.) Particularly wrenching is the scene in which Ray must quite literally choose between his children. Ray has been glibly (heh heh) and unthinkingly self-interested his entire life, and Cruise nails the horror (and, subtly, the resentment) that making a genuine life-or-death decision would fill such a man with. Moreover, the circumstances in which this decision is made reinforce the futility of the sort of heroism Ray’s son has been attempting to demonstrate throughout the film. (That’s if the scene in which the son risks his life to pull clinging stragglers onto a boat only to have the boat capsized by the aliens shortly thereafter didn’t already hit that point home. And that’s only a minute or two after meeting tthe family friends who were introduced only to be gut-wrenchingly abandoned…) By the time it dawns on Ray the type of person in whose basement he’s sealed himself and his daughter, I was reminded of the rueful blend of rage, regret, and selfish self-pity found in a line uttered by Tony Soprano in his eponymous show’s fifth season: “All of my choices were wrong.”

And perhaps that’s an appropriate quote to kick off a discussion of the film’s final third. It’s the part of the movie that forces even its most die-hard defenders to call it “flawed,” though for my money the flaws are fascinating. Have you ever seen a section of a movie that alternates between brilliance and incoherence so many times in such rapid succession? The big out-of-the-shadows “hey look! It’s Tim Robbins!” intro shot did not augur well for the upcoming sequence, and my initial misgivings (allayed for a moment by Robbins’s pretty solid tri-state area dialect, complete with “you’re welcome to stay, both’a yez”) were justified the moment Robbins began his ham-fisted “I’m crazy, get it?” bugout. But then there’s the moment where Cruise, driven to desperation by not knowing any lullabies to sing his daughter, resorts to crooning “Little Deuce Coupe” by the Beach Boys. It’s a moment that got quite a few unintentional (?) laughs from the audience, but I think it hit pretty hard (speaking as someone whose dad sang him a few Beach Boys songs as lullabies himself). But then there’s that unbelievably long and tedious and ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with the alien probe, the detection technology of which apparently hasn’t advanced that far beyond that of velociraptors. But then there’s the weird (in the old-school sense) and gruesome red-vine sequence, including the use of human blood as fertilizer and the shots of Cruise and Robbins becoming aware of what’s being sprayed all over the place. But then there’s the dopey Indepence Day aliens and more Jurassic Park cat-and-mouse. But then there’s that silent struggle for the shotgun with Robbins. But then the tension’s deflated with a goofball line, and the opportunity for Ray to do what he ends up doing minutes later only during the most Hollywood-y suspense sequence of the movie is wasted. But then there’s that terrific line–“You know what I’m going to have to do…”–and the blindfolding and the singing and the off-screen murder. And–actually, things tighten up there once again, as the desperate-times “heroism” of that action is immediately undone by another alien probe (that’s smart filmmaking, man). Maybe my favorite part of the film is when Ray grabs that ax and chops away, enraged but in vain, at the tentacle-like probe, with the past two hours’ worth of tension and disgust pouring out of the audience in an enormous wave of futile catharsis. I even bought his subsequent hand-grenade-wielding saving of the day, since so much of it depended on dumb luck rather than extraordinary actions. And even there Spielberg ladled out more awfulness as we watch a captured human sucked into the alien tripod’s orifice to be spit out as liquid. Dumb luck in the face of awfulness, ultimately, is all that saves humanity from extinction; we see it in microcosm before we see it writ large, is all.

Then there’s the “happy” ending at the end of it all, with the improbably reunited family–ex-wife, ex-in-laws, new husband, even presumed dead son. I invite viewers to watch that scene again, and as more and more family members appear to greet Ray and his daughter as they stumble down the street, tell me that Spielberg’s not aware of exactly how ridiculous this is given the movie we’ve just watched. (John Williams is certainly aware of it: The expected joyous fanfare is nowhere to be found.) It’s a happy ending so transparently contrived that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a critique of happy endings. It certainly doesn’t do anything to gain supremacy of memory over the image of Ray washing the ashen remains of other human beings from his face, or the lengthy closeup on that fleeing woman in the department store that ends only when she’s blasted from the face of the earth, or the literal river of dead bodies, or the mutilated cow (Close Encounters, Jurassic Park, Private Ryan, WotW–Spielberg and dead cows, man) during the hand-grenade sequence. And on. And on. And on.

So yes: If this movie had used zombies instead of aliens and was directed by George Romero instead of Steven Spielberg yet was in every other way the same, the genre in-crowd would be going berserk for it right about now. And not just because of the tremendously proficient craft and abundant scares, the latter of which I’m not alone in finding lacking in Romero’s latest effort (see Matt Maxwell‘s excellent and insightful LotD review, which overstates the “it’s not horror” case a bit (it’s still zombies eating people, after all) but is otherwise rock-solid). It’s got that message, is what I’m saying.

See, I watched this movie on 7/7, the day of the London terrorist bombings, so I ended up eschewing the absurd current-events interpretation offered by the film’s own screenwriter and seeing things through a different lens. What I saw was a far more universal critique than one directed at a particular nation’s particular administration’s particular conduct in a particular nation in a particular region. It was in the way the rubbernecking crowd at the crater in Ray’s town erupted into frantic chaos. (Though I found myself thinking “they should all be using cameraphones at this point”–learned that one the hard way, didn’t we?) It was in the claustrophobic mob scene around Ray’s SUV. It was in the 9/11-style flyers and posters, and the orderly and hopeless lines of fleeing survivors. It was in the way every single safe haven reached by the family was violated almost immediately. It was in the “what a story” reporter and her literally deaf cameraman. It was in the way it plays upon your suspicion that your own reaction to tragedy and terror is in some way deficient, base, selfish, stupid, subhuman. It’s the methodical articulation (vast and cool and unsympathetic) of the fear that disaster is degrading.

POSTSCRIPT: Click here for some final thoughts.

Recommended reviews:

Bill Sherman at Pop Culture Gadabout

–Generals, “The Funniest Joke in the World,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus

I have to say (without having seen the movie) that I’m thrilled Fantastic Four did as well as it did. Why? Simply because I find watching conventional wisdom form before my very eyes…annoying. And man OH man did everybody want this movie to bomb. Everybody was dying for this movie to bomb. From the celebrity snark specialists to the MSM critics to (in a relentless full–court press–how quickly we forget! (UPDATE: Whoop, we remember.)) the establishment comics-movie-crit types, the knives were out.

And not only does it not bomb, it breaks The Slump!

Since everybody I know personally who’s seen the film has told me (at worst) it’s better than they thought it would be, if not that it was in fact a really fun movie, I had a hunch the supposedly hideous opening weekend and subsequent poisonous word-of-mouth weren’t likely to materialize. Again, I haven’t seen the movie, so maybe I’ll dislike it. Then again, I tend to dislike the superhero movies that the Establishment refers to with reverent awe–Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, The Incredibles, Batman Begins, Hellboy–so seeing as how the reactions here are along the lines of the reactions to Daredevil (my favorite of the post Batman & Robin superhero crop, probably, though I like the X-Men movies too), I’m guessing I’ll kinda dig it. Sure, I’ll probably pine for Jack Kirby’s visual genius and Stan Lee’s instinctive knack for character. But mainly, for now, I’m just feeling schadenfreude that so many were so wrong about so much. (Insert smiling emoticon here.)

Post inspired in part (as is quite a bit around here, actually) by Jog.

War of the Worlds review coming soon. Teaser observation: If this movie had used zombies instead of aliens and was directed by George Romero instead of Steven Spielberg yet was in every other way the same, the genre in-crowd would be going berserk for it right about now. And there’s more where THAT came from!

In the meantime, here’s Quicktime video of every single Live 8 performance. (Link courtesy of Stereogum.) Roxy Music kick out the jams. So do Keane. And Floyd, man. Floyd.

(Because it’s not just the Dark But Shining boys who can bring you frightening things to look at online…)

Last night my wife stumbled across this short film. With no background information other than “this is weird,” we were equal parts enthralled and horrified by what we saw: footage, shot in night vision to further enhance its snuff-film/lab-surveillance verisimilitude, of a mutant man-child. This is real nightmare material.

What it is is “Rubber Johnny,” a short film by music video director Chris Cunningham using the music of his frequent collaborator Aphex Twin. (Before I discovered this, I definitely thought to myself “gee, someone’s a big ‘Come to Daddy’ fan…”) In addition to the film itself and the project’s homepage, further information about it can be found here (interview with Cunningham included) and here.

I haven’t really seen all that much of Cunningham’s work, but I always really got a kick out of just how over the top his videos for Aphex Twin are, particularly because they mesh so perfectly with the comparatively outre Aphex songs he’s been tapped to adapt; the Clive Barker references in “Come to Daddy” were an especial treat for me (as it turns out, Cunningham has worked for Barker in the past), and his outrageously tacky video for “Windowlicker” ended up being pretty prophetic in terms of the techno-video aesthetic. (It’s also worth noting that Aphex (aka Richard D. James) has made some of the most subtly frightening music I’ve ever heard–his Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 contains some moments of genuine glacial terror (a clear influence on nine inch nails auteur Trent Reznors soundtrack work for the influential first-person-shooter/horror videogame Quake), and the way the cheerily hideous lyric “I would like some milk from the milkman’s wife’s tits” blindsides you in Richard D. James Album‘s “Milkman” is unforgettable.) I’m impressed with this new foray into horror from the pair.

Go and look.

My Land of the Dead review has just been edited to fix some wonky html that made a goodly chunk of it incomprhensible. FYI.

On Friday afternoon (three cheers for getting off early from work!) I finally saw George Romero’s new zombie film Land of the Dead. (Sure, it’s only been out a week, but I feel I can still say “finally” since virtually everyone who knows me assumed I’d be there on opening night. Alas, I have no “zombie friends” here on Strong Island, and the Missus isn’t particularly responsive to gore (though to her credit she loves Night of the Living Dead), so seeing a zombie movie requires high-level logistical coordination with either my buddies from work (which can screw up my already beastly commute home) or my friends in the city (which requires me to spend upwards of 30 bucks just to see a movie). Pulling off either one of these options requires some time and effort. But I managed.)

The first thing that strikes me about it is that it’s probably the least frightening zombie movie I’ve yet seen. This is not to say that it isn’t scary at times–there are plenty of those jump-out-at-you startling moments; just that, as a friend who saw the movie with me put it, “you get the impression that the scares are just fanservice for Romero at this point, like he’d be perfectly happy to just do a straightforward drama that happened to have zombies in it at some point.” Even the gore (which was plentiful) didn’t “gross me out” as gore in zombie movies, particularly in Romero zombie movies, tends to do. Maybe this is due a lot of the Savini-patented “analog” gore effects being supplanted by CGI work; maybe it’s due to the arty, filter-y cinematography as compared to the bare-bones, brightly lit carnage of the original Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. With the exception of the most disturbing image involving fingernails since The Silence of the Lambs and I believe one other moment that I’m forgetting somehow, I didn’t get that heebie-jeebie feeling.

But I still really enjoyed this movie, because I think that being frightening is, as my friend argued, beside the point now for Romero, and what’s left is the usual thought-provoking rumination on human behavior that the best zombie movies tend to offer. (How did zombie movies become the thinking man’s horror genre? And how funny is it that mainstream-media critics are treating Romero like a respected auteur? I love it!)

However, I don’t feel that that rumination is as nakedly political as certain viewers, on both sides of the aisle, are making it out to be. Lefty Ian Brill‘s characterization of the film as a “radical” one that depicts “the neurosis of living in the ‘War on Terror'” (complete with sneer quotes), and his assertion that “Decades from now it

I just heard Iron & Wine’s cover of the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” on an M&Ms commercial.

Today’s installment: Batman Begins, directed by Christopher Nolan. Shhhh, don’t tell anybody we talked.

I unloaded about this movie on a message board right after I saw it. (I barely saw the whole thing–I came as close to walking out on it as I have on any movie since The Thin Red Line. I’ve since mellowed about it somewhat–the acting was terrific, and I appreciate the characterization of Batman as someone to be scared of–but they made such a hash out of virtually everything else that I’ve sort of de-mellowed and come to really resent the movie again.) Here’s my litany:

—–

Rutger Hauer to Morgan Freeman: “Go get all those papers and disks and data and put them on my desk right now. Also, you’re fired.” Because THAT makes sense.

I also LOVED how Alfred’s FIRST GUESS about what Master Bruce was talking about in terms of becoming a “terrifying symbol” against crime was that he was going to adopt a second persona. Because that would have totally been my first instinct too. I mean, doesn’t everybody assume that people who go missing for seven years and end up being broken out of a Himalayan prison by a death cult then come back and start talking about how they’re going to strike terror into the hearts of their enemies want to dress up in a costume and fight crime?

Haphazard, murkily edited fight scenes with drearily boring fight choreography. This is the era of Kill Bill, House of Flying Daggers, The Matrix–if you’re going to make a big deal out of your protagonist’s martial-arts training, at least make it look impressive.

Can we please have ONE comic book movie that doesn’t hinge on some big, dopey, nebulously powered sci-fi device that’s going to destroy the city? X-Men, Spider-Man 2, now this–enough.

Scarecrow, one of the film’s two major villains, was dispatched by a supporting character simply by shooting him in the face with a taser. He then gets carried off screen on a spooked horse. Wow, what a climax.

Speaking of boring and pointless Scarecrow scenes, his first confrontation with Batman lasted approximately 5 seconds before Batman got his ass handed to him. By a psychiatrist who looks like he weighs about 98 pounds.

Also, Batman’s costume is bulletproof and can withstand direct electrical currents, but it burns like polyester.

Batman’s cowl and mask are really dopey looking. The ears are too small and curve inward—they’re not intimidating. The mask curves down too low on his face and makes his chin look fat.

God knows I love Christian Bale but except for the scene where he’s interrogating the crooked cop, his Batman voice was awful, like the world’s worst Clint Eastwood impersonator.

Scenes just collide one on top of the other with no through line, no sense of transition, seemingly no logic. Characters are introduced with no build-up and no sense of pacing or timing. Bam! It’s Morgan Freeman! Bam! It’s Dr. Jonathan Crane! Bam! It’s Liam Neeson!

Katie Holmes supposedly ingests a fatal dose of fear toxin, yet she’s still coherent enough to listen to Batman’s calming instructions as he drives her around town.

That was the most boring car chase scene ever, btw. Nothing at stake—for all the jive about how Katie Holmes was gonna die, she seemed fine, no more freaked out than any normal person would be if a man in a Bat costume was driving them through the downtown of a major city at 200mph with a squad of cops chasing them)—no interesting or genuinely evil antagonists, just a bunch of thoroughly outclassed cops.

For someone who (in this version at least) is completely pathological about all crime, Batman sure doesn’t mind causing millions of dollars in property damage, does he?

“Not saving someone” and “killing someone,” in the circumstances shown in the film, are the exact same thing. That’s a truly retarded bit of fanboy morality.

“I’m not an executioner. Therefore I’m going to burn down your monastery, killing you, dozens of your henchmen, and most likely the very criminal I’m currently refusing to execute.”

“Hello, I’m a random employee of the water system, introduced during the climax of the movie simply to explain what’s going on, because I guess it’s impossible to have Morgan Freeman serve this function for some reason. Anyway, if that pressure-raising device that’s currently following the monorail above the water main gets back to this central processing plant in which I am speaking, the whole system will blow! Everybody in the audience get that? No? Okay, I’ll repeated it two minutes later!”

Not only did Batman not stop the Scarecrow, leaving it to a supporting player, he didn’t stop the subway either—he left that to another supporting player, Jim Gordon. I don’t know why it’s so hard for filmmakers to realize that the big climax of your movie should feature YOUR HEROES TAKING AN ACTIVE ROLE IN BRINGING THINGS TO THAT CLIMAX AND SOLVING THE CLIMACTIC PROBLEM. Ahem, Wachowski Brothers in The Matrix Revolutions, ahem ahem.

I’m just wondering if anyone else picked up on the fact that the theme of the film was fear? Because I don’t think they made it clear enough when EVEN BEFORE THEY INTRODUCED THE FREAKING SCARECROW they used the word fear or afraid or scared or terror or some variation thereof about six dozen times. Yes, that’s part of what Batman’s about, but it’s not ALL he’s about. Give it a goddamn rest already with the fear.

ANYONE who complained about stiff dialogue in the Star Wars prequels but didn’t complain about it here should have their Complaining License revoked. At least in the SWprequels it made some sort of sense—it was all in this sort of faux-Shakesperean milieu. Here, on the other hand, the filmmakers brag and brag about how real-world this version of Batman is, and they’re all speaking in the most unbelievably wooden shitty hackwork Batman-comic-from-1993 self-serious fashion imaginable. “How long are you planning on staying in Gotham, Master Bruce?” “As long as it takes. I want my enemies to feel my dread.” Good Lord. Rachel’s constant little speeches–“The good people do nothing, blah blah blah”–are almost unlistenably bad. And don’t even get me started on Thomas Wayne’s Basil Exposition imitation on the monorail into the city.

There’s no theme music. WTF? How can you have a Batman movie with no theme music?

This is difficult to articulate, but every character seems to display a totally unearned level of familiarity with every other character. Not thirty seconds after Bruce is introduced to the concept that Falcone runs the city, he’s sitting across from Falcone facing him down, and Falcone knows exactly who he is and is lecturing him on his psychological shortcomings. Alfred has seen Bruce for all of a few hours in seven years and he’s instantly simpatico with Bruce’s desire to become a costumed vigilante. About a minute after he meets Ducard he’s ready to climb the Himalayas to meet a total stranger. This is such unbelievably lazy writing.

Apparently two minutes is enough time for every last socialite to clear out of Wayne Manor, for their limo drivers to pull into the driveway and pick them up, and for them to get completely clear of the grounds before Ra’s al-Ghul’s thugs burn it down.

Holy moses did the jokes seem out of place and out of character! “Excuse me,” he says to the criminally insane inmates as he blasts a hole out of their cell and into the streets? Argh. Lines like that worked in the first movie, but not here.

Not to mention the fact that Batman essentially does what Ra’s and the Scarecrow do later on, which is let inmates out of Arkham Asylum.

Alfred’s near tears when he discovers that Bruce wants to tear down Wayne Manor, but then later when it actually gets destroyed he’s all “ah, no big whoop.”

“Your nice personality is just a mask. The man I loved never came back, Bruce, and I will only love you if that changes. So now let’s hold hands while I tell you how proud I am of you. Because that makes sense.”

The only character with any emotional depth is the guy who killed the Waynes, who at his parole hearing seems genuinely contrite, and therefore calls into question the notion, drilled home again and again, that compassion for criminals is a weakness. Though given the rest of the film that was probably a mistake on the filmmakers’ part rather than a conscious choice.

Speaking of which, our hero received all his training and indoctrination from what turns out to be an al Qaeda style terrorist network led by a madman. Just saying “I’m not like you guys” but then acting like them in every way save the use of lethal force (most of the time) does not exactly inspire confidence in our hero’s motive or methods.

Before he gets his Bat costume he breaks into Gordon’s office (which is stupid—once he’s decided he’s going to use a costume, he should use the Bat costume and the Bat costume only; only if he seized on the Bat as inspiration AFTER beginning his vigilante career would it make sense for him to ever go out without it) and has this whole coversation about what it would take to bring down Falcone—put pressure on the crooked judge, rely on Rachel the uncorrupt DA, etc. So what happens? He beats up Falcone at a drug buy that THE BOSS OF ORGANIZED CRIME IN GOTHAM CITY IS INEXPLICABLY ATTENDING PERSONALLY and ties him to a spotlight. I guess that’ll work too, but why bother with the meticulous explanation of what it’ll take to stop him if you’re not going to do a damn thing with it?

If you’re going to steal from Frank Miller—falling down the hole and discovering the bats, calling all the bats to help escape from a swat team, etc.–why not steal his greatest contribution to the Batman origin story and have a wounded, don’t know what to do with himself Bruce Wayne be inspired to become Batman by a giant bat that comes crashing through the picture window of Wayne Manor? Instead he’s just happily putting together his tech and is like “Oh yeah, I think bats are scary, why don’t I dress up like that.”

Also, if you’re going to have him talk in overly formal pronunciations all the time, why not actually go the whole hog and have him give the “Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot…I shall become a bat” speech?

The “What are you?” “I’m Batman” exchange made sense in the first movie because the guy asking “What are you?” had just seen a giant bat creature materialize out of nowhere, kick his partner’s ass, take bullets square in the chest and keep coming. It does NOT make sense here because Falcone hadn’t seen Batman AT ALL yet.

Those were sure some boring, non-scary “scary” hallucinations at the end there, huh?

That’s all for now, man. I’m spent.

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In retrospect I could get around a LOT of that if it weren’t for the fact that they made this HUGE deal out of the “I’m not an executioner” thing but then had him wipe out half the League of Shadows AND presumably the handcuffed prisoner too, and behave INCREDIBLY recklessly during that pointless thrillless car chase in which he was running policemen off the road, running over their cars, etc. All the smarts of developing Batman as this terrifying yet fundamentally just force went right out the goddamn window the second he ran over his first cop car and later on bragged about it to Alfred.

I’ll admit that Batman is the one character in superhero comics I’m a fanboy about (not in the icky, “Don’t call him Bats–that’s disrespectful” kinda way; I just really like the character), so I probably saw the film with a set of expectations that could only be completely fulfilled if I myself made the movie; but there you have it. It’s driving me nuts that people think this film did a good job, because the franchise is going to be continued by people who are saying to themselves “See, we really NAILED it there!” Me and my memories of how great Tim Burton’s first Batman movie was will be over here in the corner, brooding.

(Technically “part the third” if you count my Garden State musings from last month, but that’s up to you.)

This installment’s film: Secretary, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal (sp?) and James Spader, directed by Steven Shainberg. The following is a rant copied-and-pasted from a message board, so if you’re expecting Pauline Kael, hit the library. But still, I think you’ll get something out of it.

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Nearly every problem I had with this movie could be traced to the fact that the filmmakers couldn’t decide whether they wanted to do a broad Welcome to the Dollhouse/Edward Scissorhands-style parody of suburban mores or an incisive, naturalistic character piece like Closer or Naked or what-have-you. It’s almost like they decided not to decide, which led to a film that had no internal consistency or logic and gave completely disproportionate weight to certain images and scenes, thus throwing the balance of the movie out of whack like a washing machine with an off-balance load.

For example, you walk into this lawyer’s office (the lawyer is played by Spader), and it’s weirdsville in an ostentatious way. He’s got a permanent “secretary wanted” sign with lights around it like a vacancy/no vacancy sign at a motel; the entire place has been trashed; he’s got some weird blue and purple waterfall hothouse thing in his office; he’s acting like someone who just got finished having a nervous breakdown. So far, so okay–it’s like watered down version of Barton Fink, where Barton enters that terrible hotel, everything is impossibly old and decrepit, the staff are genuinely bizarre, and he meets his neighbor because the neighbor is constantly bawling loudly. But in Secretary they don’t stick with this tone at all. The best illustration of this is when she goes to his house, which is a regular house with a regular bed, and he’s jogging on a treadmill listening to a walkman for chrissake. Why would his office be so bizarre, such a caricature of a weird guy’s office, while his home is just “normal rich lawyer’s house”? It’s lazy; it’s sloppy. Same with Lee (Gyllenhaal’s character) herself: When we first meet her she’s leaving what appears to be a fairly realistic residential treatment facility–she describes the routine, she hugs her therapist (who’s a normal-looking guy) goodbye, etc. By the time she applies for a job–which she does with an airheaded glee and unbridled enthusiasm that, to put it mildly, does not exactly jibe with her “I can’t feel anything in real life so I cut myself to make the pain real” demeanor before then–she’s got this enormous Tim Burton purple raincoat on and is acting like, well, like a lazy Hollywood screenwriter’s idea of what a submissive should act like, not like what an ACTUAL person who’s going on an ACTUAL journey from self-mutilator to sexual submissive would act like. Fuck, man, I don’t know anyone who’d sit there and allow themselves to be grilled on personal matters the way the lawyer grilled her during their first meeting. And that’s to say nothing of the styleless stylization of the dream sequence, the cheap-shot kitsch of the laundromat-slash-diner, etc ad nauseum. If that’s how you wanna play this–it’s a fable, it’s a fairy tale, whatever–fine, but realize that you’re undoing any kind of sophisticated, reality-based character development you hinted at earlier.

And then there’s the supporting characters, who again are not characters at all but IDEAS of characters. Leslie Ann Warren’s mom character–I’m sorry, but am I the only one who’s sick to death of these offensive suburban-mom-zombie stereotypes in movies? You can tell from the MOMENT you see her that she’s not even going to APPROACH having three dimensions–she’s just going to be comically accomodating to Lee in order to mask how over-the-top messed up her home life is, blah blah blah, BORING! C’mon, man, you could have at least TRIED to make her an interesting character! The by-the-numbers domestic-abuse thing was fucking idiotic too. So were the soulless sister and her friends, chilling by the pool in their tacky outfits–oh, they couldn’t POSSIBLY fathom the complexity and depth of Lee’s relationship, she’s so BEYOND their petty bourgeois concecerns, blah blah blah.

Ditto poor Jeremy Davies, who’s given the thankless task of playing someone who does NOTHING wrong other than fall in love, and we’re supposed to feel superior to him because he’s not “hep” to the s&m “jive” that’s Lee & Spader’s “bag.” “Did I hurt you?” “(sigh) No.” Ha ha ha ha ha, you fuckin’ square, that’ll teach you to actually be concerned about the feelings of the woman you love! She’s too cool for you, you loser with your job at J.C. Penney! You’ve gotta learn to, like, actually FEEL things, and like cut through the BULLSHIT of SOCIETY and shit, and really truly LOVE, and DUH the way you do that is by allowing your employer to jerk off on your bare ass! I mean, GOD, Jeremy Davies, what a LOSER you are!

Arrrrgh.

Maggie Ggyylleennhhaall also can’t act. Particularly when you put her up against Spader, who as my wife has been saying can do more with his eyes than most actors can do with an entire script. Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, has a face with the emotional communicativity of a soggy marshmallow. At any given moment–well, let’s take the immediate aftermath of the he-just-jerked-off-on-her scene by way of a for instance–you can’t tell WHAT the fuck we’re supposed to think she’s feeling. Is she happy, sad, turned on, angry, disappointed, disgusted, what? There’s NOTHING going on in that giant moonpie of a face, NOTHING. Although I do agree with the Missus that she has a cute speaking voice.

Spader’s character was a mess too, and no amount of fine acting on his part can redeem that. Is he obsessive-compulsive or suffering from mental exhaustion? Is he a dedicated and successful lawyer or a basket case who occasionally destroys his own office and hides from his ex-wife in the closet? His decisions to sometimes berate Lee, sometimes do B&D with her, sometimes act like an actual concerned human being, sometimes act like a zombie, sometimes act like a run-of-the-mill mean boss, sometimes act like a loving boyfriend–who can say why he makes any of them? Pouring a whole bunch of contradictory shit into a character doesn’t necessarily make him “complex”–it just makes your writing lazy.

I also don’t buy the theory advanced by some fans of the film that this dom/sub relationship is something the lawyer just stumbled into and he’s just as surprised as we are. A) The clear implication is that this has happened before with previous secretaries; B) He DOES happen to own various harnesses and an actual horse’s saddle, not to mention the bale of hay he has her kneel on as he saddles her up.

The score sucked. I hate saying this, because god knows Angelo Badalamenti gets a lot of points for his work on Twin Peaks. But he just draped all this lugubrious, melodramatic gunk over every scene. Yuck.

The movie also gave almost no thought to what characters it created and what it did with them. Why build this big mystery about the paralegal, and the previous secretary, and the domineering wife, only to have them show up and plead with Lee in the middle of the string of concerned parties during that idiotic desk/hunger strike scene at the end? At one point there’s an out-of-focus woman in the background while Lee is doing something or other. Who was she? Why was she there? Was nobody paying attention to these things? Any time you show something in a film, somebody has made a CHOICE to show that thing. You have a finite time and a finite space in cinema, and therefore everything that shows up on the screen is given a certain weight disproportionate to what it might have in real life. As Chekhov put it, “If you show a gun on the mantel in the first act, someone better fire it by the final act.” We saw plenty of guns that no one fired, or that turned out to be not guns but bananas or shoes or bulletin boards.

And that scene was beyond retarded. You’re telling me that nobody after Jeremy Davies–not mom, not dad, not sis, not brother-in-law, not spurned future parents-in-law whose heirloom wedding dress she’s been pissing in, not the police, not the EMTs, not her old counselor, NOBODY–decided “you know what? fuck this, she’s not handcuffed to the desk or anything, we’re taking her out of here?” Also, the lawyer’s sitting around his house the whole time. Nobody wanted to pay him a visit–not the cops, not the families, not the reporters, NOBODY? Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. It was beyond stupid.

How could you decorate a hall that your clients walk up and down all the time with those typo-circled letters and the lingerie glamour shot Lee had taken for the lawyer? I think maybe somebody might have found that a little unusual.

Alright, we get it, you liked the pool scene from The Graduate! You also liked the running-from-the-wedding scene! You also liked the May-December romance angle! You also liked the plastic suburbanites! Whoop-dee-doo!

And that final shot of her staring at the audience was so condescending and patronizing it made my hair hurt. It’s supposed be a challenge to us boozhwah squares in the audience–you think I’m weird, but look, I live in YOUR neighborhood, I’m a complete and fulfilled person, who are you to judge, blah blah fucking blah. But the thing is, the only people who are going to see a movie like this is people who ALREADY THINK all those things about the rest of America. So what reads on the surface as a challenging stare is really just a way to get the audience to feel smug and superior about the Wal-Mart-shopping SUV-driving missionary-position-using proles. How tedious.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure a deeply dysfunctional sexual relationship predicated on an employer taking advantage of his employee’s deep-rooted self-destructive psychological problems makes for the great love story we’re supposed to think this is, thank you very much. When you get right down to it, this is a guy who allowed this woman to sit in place for three days without eating or drinking, going to the bathroom on herself (I’d say “and freaking out her family” but they react to it like it’s the teddy-bear picnic, because yeah, THAT makes sense, that’s exactly how the family of an institutionalized cutter would react if she went on a hunger strike) rather than act. This doesn’t make me think “wow, look how tough it is for him to loooove! How sweet!”, it makes me think “grow the fuck up, douchebag.” There’s nothing romantic about destructive behavior. At least Closer recognized this. This movie is the anti-Closer. It’s juvenalia in sophisticate drag.

All in all, this movie was not nearly as smart as it quite obviously thought it was. To quote Roger Ebert, I hated, hated, hated this movie.

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Ahhhh, I feel much better. Next up, if you’re very quiet about it: Batman Begins…?