August 30, 2010

Final Girl Film Club: Hellbound

This is another Final Girl Film Club review.

In this film, Chuck Norris stops the Book of Revelations from happening. Doesn’t that sound cool? Can’t you just picture Chuck giving a roundhouse to the anti-christ? Or taking down the many-eyed goat while the streets erupt in fire and the angels blow their trumpets? Well, keep dreaming. This isn’t that movie. Besides the goat eyes sported by the main bad guy, here’s the only demon in the entire movie:

There are no cool demons, no skies raining blood. And there are no roundhouses here. There are hardly any fights at all. I mean, I knew this movie was going to be bad, but I hoped for some good fight scenes. Nope. Mostly what we get is Norris standing around staring at things. But maybe this wooden veneer hides a complex subtext…

So the movie starts in 1186 during the Crusades. An emissary of the devil, the pharmaceutically named Prosatanos, is opening diplomatic negotiations between hell and the human world by trying to stab a baby with a huge golden dildo complete with golden nut sack. As he raises his phallus to impale the infant, Prosatanos is pierced with two shafts himself. Then he gets reamed up the backside by a priest. Those priests… Prosatanos is shoved back inside his womb-like tomb, vowing to be born again. Then the king takes his own mighty phallus and chops up the emissary’s golden dildo into nine little pieces. These nine pieces are then scattered around the world so that the phallus may never rise again.

In 1951, Prosatanos is awoken from his slumber. And who, you may ask, awakens him? Two grave-robbing Arabs of course. Yes, two Arabs unleash the forces of hell on the world. Is this an American movie, or what? So anyway, the devil’s emissary is back and has to piece together his broken phallus before he can do any more impaling.

Now the movie skips ahead thirty years to the gritty streets of Chicago. Norris plays a Chicago cop who is supposed to be a tough, Dirty Harry type. Yet mainly he just stands around because I guess it’s tougher to look like you could kick ass than to actually go and kick any. And his name is Shatter. Shatter. But wait, it’s a cool self-referential thing, because the main special effect in this movie is the breaking of glass. People are thrown through windows and against glass shelves, over and over again. So yeah, his name’s Shatter. He discovers a horrible murder in which a rabbi has had his heart ripped out and Chuck Norris is beaten up by the murderer, Prosatanos, who is sporting a mullet longer than Chuck’s. Yes, you heard that right: Chuck Norris is beaten up. Actually, he’s thrown against a wall. Why a guy who can rip people’s hearts from their chests just throws Shatter against a wall is beyond my feeble mind to contemplate. Anyway, clues lead Shatter and his annoying partner to discover the love interest. The love interest serves only to prove Shatter’s manliness to his partner, since heterosexuality for men is actually dependent upon homosocial approval. The partner concedes that Shatter is in fact manly and the story goes on. To Israel.

And here the movie makes a subtle commentary on world politics. First, we are lead to learn that the Israeli police are ineffectual at dealing with their own problems. The Middle East can’t handle itself: check. Then we also learn that Interpol has been following a string of murders but can’t put the pieces together. Europe has all the evidence it needs, but doesn’t have the brains or guts to act: check. So enter America, or at least it’s blonde mulletted emissary. Shatter takes with him his subservient black partner who only thinks about basketball and food. The two of them break local laws and use local thieves to uncover the truth they know is hidden and – voilá! – you’ve got American foreign policy in a neat little mulletted package served piping hot with centuries-old stereotypes.

So this all must build up to a killer fight scene, right? RIGHT? Sadly, no. Yes, there is a fight scene, but it mostly involves Shatter and his partner falling over and Prosatanos playing teleportation hide-and-seek. No martial arts showdown ensues. Instead, Shatter picks up the fallen golden phallus and then throws it at 200 miles an hour, shoving the thing deep within Prosatanos. This causes Prosatanos to light up like a sparkler and explode. Ah, the sweet release. After this pyrotechnic ejaculation, the dildo is back in nine pieces, which are then collected by a guy impersonating Jesus wearing a Mary Magdalene robe. And the movie ends with Shatter not kissing the love interest, because girls are icky. Real men prefer the company of other men.

Now just imagine all this with painfully bad acting, dark lighting, and boring shots and you can rush out right now and remove this movie from your Netflix queue. This is one bad movie.

August 26, 2010

Satoshi Kon dead

I just learned from Same Hat! that Satoshi Kon, the director of Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika, and Paranoia Agent, just died of cancer. At the age of 46. It’s heartbreaking and it’s a huge loss.

If you’ve never seen the work of Satoshi Kon, then I suggest you treat yourself. His work is “anime,” but unlike any anime you’ve seen. His characters have depth and his narratives are structurally adventurous. He is a filmmaker. Or was.

This LA Weekly article has a nice discussion of Kon and focuses mostly on Paranoia Agent, which you can view here.

June 30, 2010

film version of “The Yellow Wallpaper”: the narrative of motherhood is too strong

So I often read “The Yellow Wallpaper” with my students and I just read it again this quarter. I’m always amazed at how it’s structured and how Gilman reveals subtle clues throughout the story. On this last reading, I noticed more closely how the descriptions of the room the narrator is in change. I don’t mean the descriptions of the wallpaper itself, but the other things in the room. For instance, the bed gets more gnawed as the story progresses, a sign that she’s been chewing on it long before she mentions doing so. But one of the amazing things about the story is that it’s still shocking today. Students are often confused at the mention the baby. I sometimes have to tell them outright that the narrator is a mother. Then the students are confused as to why she would abandon her child. Their narrative is that mothers just don’t do that. So they retreat to the easy answer that “she’s just crazy.” I try to get my students to entertain the idea that maybe taking care of the baby contributed to her going crazy. But post-partum depression is a difficult concept. Partly this is due to the fact that most of my students have never had to take care of a child. But part of it is the old narrative that being a mother completes a woman. “Women naturally long to be mothers and they are naturally good at it,” the narrative tells us. And since there aren’t many narratives that contradict this idea (partly because of shame on the part of the women who could tell us otherwise), most people accept the narrative.

All this is a long preamble to say that a film of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is in production. It may turn out to be a good movie in and of itself. Yet it’s hard for me not to see the changes that have been made to the story and shake my head.

I don’t care that they changed the narrator’s name to Charlotte (a nod to the fact that the story fits closely to Gilman’s own experience, I assume). I don’t care that Jennie is now the narrator’s sister and not the narrator’s husband’s sister. I’m not too upset about the couple being destitute, either. What really annoys me is what they’ve done with the baby. The baby is dead. She died in the fire that made the family destitute. So Charlotte’s madness is motherly grief at the loss of her child. Yes, parents lose children. Yes, it is probably the worst grief a person can face. I have a friend who lost her eleven-year-old son, so I’ve seen some of this first-hand. It is not the subject matter itself that I object to, but from that which it was changed.

You see, a mother grieving the loss of her child conforms to narrative of motherhood I mentioned above. In this movie, madness is caused by a woman not being allowed to be a mother, her “true” role. So the movie refuses to challenge the common narrative of motherhood. Which means that this movie isn’t as brave as Gilman’s story. Her story doesn’t only explore the feelings of a woman feeling trapped by conforming to the narrative of motherhood, but also trapped by a patriarchal system that governs marriage and medicine. The story attempts to challenge and deconstruct the many assumptions that pervade the narrative of femininity.  What this film version shows us is that 118 years later, challenging this narrative is still taboo.  How far have we really come?

June 28, 2010

Final Girl Film Club: It’s Alive

This is a review for the Final Girl Film Club.

The scariest thing in this movie is how the main character’s check jacket clashes with the floral wallpaper in his house. I would like to think this was an ingenious way of showing the character’s unease, but this movie was made in 1974. In the 70s my family had a house with purple floral wallpaper, green shag carpet, and a mustard yellow refrigerator. The hipsters of the 70s  just didn’t know any better.

The next scariest thing in this movie is the dehumanized nature of hospital birth. Babies are taken from their mothers and put into nurseries, left to cry alone in a warehouse of plastic cribs. Husbands are not allowed to be with their wives during the birth process. Expectant mothers are forced to lie flat on their backs, which is now widely regarded as one of the worst positions in which to give birth. It all makes me really thankful that I had a child when and where I did.

All this is to say that the movie isn’t scary. Which, for a horror movie, is, you know, kind of a problem. That said I still kind of liked this flick.

If you don’t know, the basic premise of this film is that a couple gives birth to some kind of genetic mutant that likes to fly at people’s throats like the rabbit in The Holy Grail and chow down. A tad unsettling; most babies can’t eat solid food until eight months. To add to the misfortune, the baby looks like a rubber monster from an old Dr Who episode and it never seems to stay a consistent size. So when it appears during the movie, whatever dramatic tension was building in a scene suddenly escapes and the scene flops to the floor like a deflated balloon. Luckily, Larry Cohen, the director, seems to understand this and doesn’t show the baby too much. At least in the beginning.

He focuses mostly on the guy in the check jacket, Frank (John Ryan). Frank is not easy to like. He’s got a pompous swagger and he’s quick to judge. There’s a waiting anger just below the surface of him that comes out in dismissive looks and choked off sentences. But as I was watching him, I found him to be very engaging and very familiar. When he started talking about Irish words for babies it came to me: he reminded me of my father and his side of the family. That and the 70s décor struck a personal chord within me and drew me into the film. I began to love Frank’s wise-ass smirk. And it takes some real acting to make an unlikeable character sympathetic. So my hat’s off to John Ryan.

I was getting more and more into the movie until about half way in. The growing tensions bearing down on Frank and his crumbling relationship with his wife Lenore (Sharon Farrell) were engaging. But then Lenore’s character stopped going anywhere. Once she goes crazy, that’s it. And isn’t even an interesting, Lady Macbeth kind of crazy. There is no sense of guilt or loss in her craziness, so she’s more annoying than disturbing. It’s a real waste of dramatic material. Also, the last half of the movie becomes a hunt for the baby, and, as I mentioned, the more the movie focuses on the baby the more silly it is. Then there’s a really hard to decipher scene in the family basement. It’s meant to be an important moment and full of tension, but poor lighting and sloppy editing take the life out of the scene and make it confusing instead of terrifying.

For all the laughable rubber baby moments, the movie has some great parts. As I said, I really liked the first half. And there’s a great scene in which a bunch of cops pull their guns on an innocent infant.

I also liked Frank’s turnaround at the end. The entire movie, Frank is willing to have his murderous baby killed and he even signs its life away to science. Yet when he finally faces his spawn in the end, tears roll down his eyes. It happens a little too quickly, but it’s still a moving change. Yes, I’m a dad myself. Yes, Frank reminded me a bit of my own dad. Yet, I found it affecting and strangely healing that Frank finally learns to love his mutated son.

Overall, the character of Frank and society’s treatment of the family are really intriguing, but obviously Larry Cohen didn’t know how to develop the ideas. Or maybe he was just more interested in showing a killer baby. I get the feeling he couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted a horror movie, a comedy, a family drama, or a satire. Maybe those elements could have all been brought together, but here they pull the film in different directions. Instead of complexity we get discord and an uneven tone. There’s just a lot of unfulfilled potential in this movie. So much so that the film almost begs to be remade. Oh, wait. It was. And it sucked. Never mind.

April 25, 2010

duotone Carnivale page 81

When I was a kid, Clash of the Titans was one of my favorite movies and the Medusa scene really made my hair stand on end. It’s kind of fun to be able to be in control of the narrative of Medusa now. Maybe the opposite of fear is not courage, but controlling the story.

April 19, 2010

JCVD

I just saw the movie JCVD last night and I still haven’t stopped shaking my head in amazement.

I remember seeing Jean-Claude Van Damme movies in high school on TV. I was always amazed at how the guy could do a perfect round house kick and drop into the splits at a moment’s notice. But the plots were always the same. I have had a running joke that I use when I discuss plot in my classes: “When your friend asks you what a movie was about, what you tell her is the plot: “A guy’s friend gets beat up in a martial arts competition. The main guy trains in a forest to be a martial artist, part of said training being the cracking open of his groin. He enters the competition and after several fights he gets to KO the guy who hurt his friend by dropping into the splits and upper-cutting the guy in the testicles.’ Which is the plot to every single Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.”

In other words, a joke.

When I saw the trailer to JCVD I was surprised. Still, I thought the movie was a spoof. Instead of being a hero, Jean-Claude is a desperate has-been actor. I was impressed that Jean-Claude would poke fun at his image like that. But that’s about as far as my thought process went and I never went out to actually see the movie.

So I was both taken aback and excited when my wife rented JCVD the other night. She’s not a martial arts movie fan, but since we both thought it was a spoof, we thought it’d be fun entertainment.

The actual movie blew away my expectations. yes, JCVD plays around with the image of Van Damme, but it is not simply a spoof or a comedy. It is a meditation on fame and the price of actually achieving one’s dreams. And, more amazingly, Van Damme gives an incredibly moving six minute, single take monologue that put tears in my eyes. Yes, when he talks about the honesty in a martial arts dojo, I know what he’s talking about. Yes, when he talks about his daughter (he actually has a son, by the way), I can relate because I have a daughter myself. But it’s not just my personal identifications that drew me in. It was his acting. HIS ACTING! JEAN-CLAUDE VAN FUCKING DAMME!

What the movie ends up being about is a man held hostage by his own life and his own decisions and failings. The character Van Damme depicts in the movie is imperfect, but wanting to be better. He wants to be an actual hero, but is constantly sidetracked by his fame and his own inconsistent attention. The movie has real weight. It is a deep exploration of character. Really.

While Steven Seagal claims he is a buddhist spiritual leader endowed with clairvoyance, Jean-Claude Van Damme shows us an imperfect man trying to make sense of his life. Even if it’s all just an act (and what an act), this film conveys much more truth than Seagal’s Buddhism-for-beginners blathering. Jean-Claude Van Damme shows me something about what it means to be human.

And I can’t believe I just wrote that.

December 3, 2009

the last father

This is for a comics story that’s been floating in my head a long time. I actually mentioned it a year ago when I saw images of the film version of The Road. I’ve since read McCarthy’s book and while there is the similarity of father and child in a post-apocalyptic setting, I think my concerns are much different than McCarthy’s (it feels weird comparing myself to Cormac McCarthy at all). As much as I liked The Road, I didn’t find the father/son dynamic particularly realistic. Or at least, it didn’t reflect my own experiences with parenting and that’s what I want to explore with my story. I’m doing thumbnails for it here and there. I have no idea when I’ll get to actually working on the finished pages of the thing.

September 4, 2009

180 degree rule and Artists on Comics Art summary

Not everyone in comics adheres to the 180 degree rule (also known as the axis of action). But to me, I think it’s useful for getting clarity in one’s work. I see it like grammar rules in writing: it’s best to follow them, unless situations warrant a change. For instance, English is a S-V-O language, and if one constructs sentences that follow a strict subject-verb-object order without intrusions then one’s sentences will be clearer. Yet if one does that all the time, one’s writing will be very boring. For me, the same thing goes with the 180 degree rule. It’s the default setting, but slavishly adhering to it may deaden your art.

I bring all this up because Mark Kennedy has a discussion of times when this rule can be successfully broken.

Also, I found a link to a synopsis of the book Artists on Comics Art. The summary is so fascinating that I think I may need to buy the book (and yet again, it’s a book on comics with a horrible cover–the trend continues…).

June 24, 2009

Judex

May 26, 2009

photographic juxtaposition and Persepolis movie

I was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this weekend and it was wonderful. I really liked the William Kentridge exhibit and the ability to see Klee’s Virgin In a Tree and Hero with Wing up close. But what got me really thinking was the exhibit about Robert Frank’s The Americans. The descriptions next to the photographs explained Frank’s process for how he chose to sequence those images. Some things had to do with design, say a hand from one photo pointing the way to the next, or two images with strong vertical compositional elements put in sequence. What intrigued me were the photos placed in sequence to elicit theme. For instance, one photo was of a snooker table and the pegs of the snooker table formed a cross, accentuated by the angle of the shot. The next photo was of a gas station. The sign above the station said “save gas”, but the letters for “gas” were dark and so the white letters of “save” stood out. Put together, these two photos hint at the religious foundations of U.S. society. Without showing a single church, Frank is able to show how Christian the U.S. is. This really struck me. I don’t have any theoretical term or rule I can apply to this, but I want to think more about how juxtaposition can create meanings that are only alluded to. I’m sure this happens unconsciously all the time, but it’d be fun to play around with controlling this more.

I also saw the film version of Persepolis. I liked how the art was changed. The added backgrounds added a sense of place that the graphic novel lacked. However, the film lacked the one interesting subtext of the book, the connection between the violence in the country and the violence in Satrapi’s family. Or more accurately, the desire of political groups to have power and control the minds of their fellow Iranians was echoed in the power dynamics of the family. Again, the film missed this. But the film and the graphic novel have essentially the same problem. Both of them end up being a sequence of plot points. There’s not much character or analysis. Motivations, internal conflicts, contradictions, and the like are absent. This is also absent from Epileptic to a certain extent (Satrapi is obviously very inspired by David B.), but David B. makes up for this with his incredible visual experimentation. Also, he proposes the interesting thesis that his brother’s mental illness and his own artistic drive are two facets of the same underlying issue. My overall point is that Persepolis is interesting on the surface and novel for someone not familiar with Iranian culture, but there’s not much below that.

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