(Brief) Review: The Secret of Kells

I cannot describe this movie to you, and that's the beauty of it. I could skim over the surface of what it's about—Irish history, Irish mythology, art, fear—but that would not encapsulate this film.

Because this is a story that could not be told in this way in any other medium. Not with computer animation; not with live actors; not on paper, whether black inked or four-colored. This story needed the warmth and vibrance of hand-drawn pictures, the abstracted art direction, the haunting visuals. This was a story that had to be told through pictures first, with the sound only there to supplement what your eyes were taking in.

It is about the Book of Kells, yes; and about a boy, and a girl, and two old men. It's about the Northmen and the magic of Ireland. But it's more than those, and it's not those the way you'd expect. This isn't the light whipped-cream, unflavored-meringue version of Ireland American wants you to digest. This is more honest than that, and more amazing. Never has a cartoon had to do so little work to make me cry.

The Secret of Kells gets five out of five haunting visuals. This is an arthouse film, and I saw it near the end of its run at the Aquarius, so it may be hard to find before it comes out on DVD. But if you get a chance to watch it, do so; you will not be disappointed. I almost promise.

Review: Ink

And now for happier topics:

See Ink.

No, seriously. You should. It's likely this is the first you're hearing of it, and it's very unlikely you recognize any of the names involved in its production; but this is one of those times where independent film soars.

Because this film works so heavily on its atmosphere, and because it is not something like Paranormal Activity that you're likely to know much about, I am going to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible.

A summary has trouble doing this film justice, because, lacking spoilers, it is impossible to make it sound anything but trite—and the inability to summarize its originality may be Ink's only weakness. It's about a world just beside and layered over our own, where beings of light and beings of shadow govern the more ephemeral aspects of our existence; it's about one angry, tortured soul and his decision to purge himself of that pain; and it's about humanity, and family, and what has to happen for us to change our path.

But what makes Ink stand out is not the skeleton of its plot; what makes Ink stand out is the meat and the skin, the way the details of this other-world are executed and the style and tone of the setting. Director/writer Jamin Winans creates an urban fairytale that manages to step outside the typical bums-at-a-Ren-Faire look, with a mythology that makes you shiver as much as giggle. The cinematography is expertly frenetic, and the actors hit the proper note at allo times. The movie is often quiet, and often cold; but these are part of the Ink mystique. Even the sparse smattering of fight scenes manage some originality, even as they derive a dash or two of inspiration from Guy Ritchie or the Wachowski brothers. The movie takes unknown actors and a low budget and runs with them, breeding originality underneath a layer of predictability. One look at the design for the Incubi, and the industrial-Dreamtime look of the sets, and I'd almost bet money you'll be sold.

And do not get me wrong, this film is on occasion predictable; some of the hints as to what is going on are perhaps too broad, and the story at base is a layer of black and a layer of gray over something we've all seen before. But it manages to never coddle its viewers—there is no scene full of exposition that doesn't feel natural within the flow of the story, and even those take place much later than lesser productions would have allowed; and beyond that, it does so much good with the details of that predictable story that I cannot fault them for sticking within the bounds of their chosen fable.

In the end, I give Ink five out of five terrifying black-and-white nerds. This is proof that it's not telling something original that matters; it's telling what you can find in an original way. A must-view for fans of Henson, Gilliam, or del Toro.

Review: Sherlock Holmes

Short version: A well-crafted and visually enthralling reinterpretation of the Holmes mythos, with a high degree of attention and faithfulness to same; worth a watch for anyone who is willing to take their Holmes with a dash of irony.

Longer version, con MILD SPOILERS:

Robert Downey, Jr. plays a degenerate genius faced with a new and dangerous challenge; Jude Law plays the more traditional and upright man who acts as Abbott to Downey's Costello. They fight crime in a stylized but largely faithful rendition of Victorian England.

Sound good?

Now add in that their characters are adaptations of two of literature's most famous characters, and that the film is being directed by none other than Guy Ritchie, he of the camera ninjitsu and stylized violence.

If that doesn't still sound like it's worth a try, you're right; this movie isn't for you. As for myself, I went in to Sherlock Holmes a skeptic, and came out grateful for my willingness to try something new.

First of all, let me say: Yes, in this movie, Holmes and Watson beat people up. However, it is clear that this violence is a stylistic choice on the part of the director and the writer, not just somebody slapping the Holmes name onto a Victorian action movie. The detective work is all there, right down to the insane leaps of deduction that we could have made, too, if we'd had Holmes' peculiar body of knowledge; this Holmes just adds bareknuckle fighting and Bartitsu to his list of skills—skills which, as the writers have tried to make clear, are here and there implied in the original stories, and which are approached by the film in the same way it seems likely that Holmes would approach them: analytically and with a cold precision that a normal person could not muster at that speed.

Let me also say that the version of Holmes brought to life by Robert Downey Jr. and Ritchie's cinematography is one of my favorites of all time. Holmes is captured here as an eccentric genius, prone to bizarre behavior and serious self-abuse when not occupied by a case, lacking in social graces when his work does not require them, and self-absorbed in the extreme. In addition to Downey's acting, Ritchie's methods of portraying Holmes' thought process are mesmerizing; I really felt like I saw (and heard) the world the way a mind like Holmes would experience it.

I have to give credit to the other points of brilliance shining in this movie, too: Law's performance as Watson, the original straight man, is pitch-perfect, showcasing the character's intelligence and his occasional distaste for Holmes' lifestyle, and adding in a fast-paced banter that makes the relationship engaging and gives it the feel of a deep and lasting friendship. Mark Strong is delightfully scene-chewing as neo-fascist Lord Blackwood; Rachel McAdams does a great job as a character whose identity I will not spoil; and the rest of the crew are excellent, as well. Ritchie's camerawork is amazing throughout, and whoever is doing foley, prop, and set design for this movie deserves a nomination or two for capturing a filthy, crowded, dismal view of Victorian London, and for fascinating gadgets that manage to capture the genius of their creators without veering off into unnecessary steampunk.

Special praise has to be given to the script, though, above and beyond making fight scenes in a Holmes movie actually work. The script is not only engaging, witty, and atmospheric, but seems, to this amateur's view, painstakingly researched; it captures the climate—social, political, and meteorological—of England in that time; builds on scientific theory both from that era and (in the case of the inventions) a bit beyond; and gets its dates and facts straight both for actual English history and the (sadly) fictional history of Holmes, Watson, et al. And on the note of history, the most important of the script's strengths is the sense of love: the feeling that the writers knew the Holmes stories well and wanted to do them justice, even as they traveled a bit of a different path than more traditional versions of the character and his mythos. The story feels like fan-fiction, but more Laurie R. King than GeoCities: this is fan-fiction worthy of being published, provided it comes with the caveat that the writer knows where they've strayed from canon.

If I had to put a black mark on the film's record, it would be its preoccupation with being epic. The movie feels like it was born to be marketed as "Sherlock Holmes's greatest adventure yet", with the plot very publicly encompassing the entirety of England and involving a plan to—what else?—take over the world. Likewise, for as much as I praised the fighting for being interesting, one or two of the action segments felt a little shoe-horned in, as though this started as a much more action-oriented script and got cut down to size. The movie is at its best when it's the calculating, bizarre version of Holmes involved in a dark mystery, with the action blended in here and there as appropriate; a massive chase scene with a giant French bruiser feels like a maraschino cherry on my steak.

END SPOILERS

All that said, I highly recommend this movie, with the caveat that being too much of a purist about Holmes will make this movie feel like a drag. But if you can accept a mention here or there of fighting skills turning into Holmes beating people up with night-sticks, you'll find a clever little mystery and a lot of fun bits of Holmes trivia, wrapped up in a stylish and witty shell that even manages to be a little bit cerebral. I give this movie four out of five brilliant deductions, absolutely none of which are elementary.

Bawdy Storytelling

So, first of all: Not Providence will go up tomorrow, though perhaps not at the usual time; I didn't get a chance on my lunch break to get the edited update converted for Web viewing, and may not finish it before the 9-5 starts tomorrow morning.

And why, do you ask, did I not finish that tonight? Why, Tyler? Why would you strand us like this?

Two words for you: Bawdy Storytelling.

Some of you may have heard of this, and if so, and you like it or aren't in the SF Bay Area, feel free to move on and not read this post. If you haven't heard of it, then read on.

Bawdy Storytelling is exactly what it sounds like: perverts getting together and listening to perverts talk about being one, in the form of 10-ish minute stories told up on a stage at a nice bar in the Mission.

Bawdy Storytelling is also some things that are not apparent from the name: Bawdy Storytelling is an honest and friendly community; incredibly, sides-clutching funny; encouraging of newcomers; and a showcase for some really, madly, deeply talented storytellers. There are performers at this show who have blown me away with their skill at facial expression, powerful delivery, and just plain balls-out honesty. Bill Hicks would be proud.

It's late, and I recently took some Alka-Seltzer Cold (the night-time formula, because I'm wild and uncouth); so it is entirely likely that my words are not encompassing the true worth of Bawdy. So I'll tell you a story.

I have attended Bawdy Storytelling twice.

The first time, when giving my ride directions to my office (the show starts at a time such that we needed to hurry there right after I get off work), we miscommunicated about the road, and she wound up five miles east of where I was and unable to see a street sign. We fought traffic the whole way. And when we got there in time for the inspirational opening ukelele piece (oh yes, it's true), we were ecstatic.

The second time, my ride got held up at home, and then took an incorrect exit and wound up headed north instead of south; she arrived at 6:30 instead of 5:30, when we had been told that it started an hour early, at 7, instead of the usual 8. We were not the most cautious drivers on the way there, but were safe. And when we got there at 7:20 and discovered it indeed not only planned to start at 8 after all, but wound up starting late, we were pleased. And as soon as we knew the date for the January show, we immediately started making plans to be there.

Something about Bawdy sabotages our days (though mine was pretty gentle to me, I expect due to the Sick taking care of the bad luck already), and yet, we always find time to be there. I was dubious for months, but now I can't imagine missing it for anything that doesn't involve blood or wedding rings. When I say Bawdy Storytelling is amazing, I mean it; if you can put up with some nasty words and some very frank discussion of sex (and I mean frank in all caps, twenty-point font, letters of fire), it is some of the best performance I have ever had the pleasure to see, and especially for the $10 entrance fee.

Now, the organizer of the show very strongly encourages us to spread the word and help Bawdy Storytelling grow; so if you are interested, please, check out their website at bawdystorytelling.com, and see if the topic and timing for next month's show interests you. I might be there; who knows, I might even be onstage.

But not if you attend, Mom; there are some experiences that I think we're both happy keeping separate.

Reviews: Where the Wild Things Are; Me and You and Everyone We Know; and Myself

Actually reviewing these movies cannot do them justice. Both of them are bizarre and heart-rending and quirky and sweet and painful, and display a mastery of directing emotion and just plain showing humanity as it is that I am not sure I have ever seen anywhere else. See them; you will absolutely not regret.

This post is more about the things I and these movies have in common: Quirks; emotions; and a sense of rawness and the desire to close the distance.

Both the aforementioned movies are highly emotion-driven movies. Max and the Wild Things are emotions gone out of control, an intensity of feeling that both viewed and viewer have difficulty processing it's so bright and sharp. The characters of Me and You and Everyone We Know are having difficulty processing, but it's difficulty processing life: processing our little failures, our day-to-days, our lack of control over some things and the basic happinesses and sadnesses that codify existence. The characters all in their own ways speak of waiting for a world that's fantastic, of being ready to be amazed and confused, and do not know how to deal, except in the heat of the moment, with how amazing life really can be. And I think it's both those things—the extremes and the wonders of the day-to-day—that I've lately been letting myself miss.

I fight not to be this guy; the person who is spoken to by a movie, who reinvents himself via cinematic quotes and who swears on directors or authors the way others swear on the Bible. And yet, how much have I judged that because of media's capacity to sway my mood?

I won't give you the massive essay I was penning here for a little bit; it's long and it's maybe even a little too private. But the bottom line is that these movies spoke to the things in life I was letting myself miss—to the strangeness of reality, to the little beauties all around us, to the simple power of innocence and the basic bizarre loving insanity of human nature. You can call it Oedipal if you want, Lacanian, an effort to get back to the prelingual. You can drape the bones of it in whatever meat you want, put a little coat on it, make it dance around. The crux of it is the same: these movies have deeply moved me and made me consider things that I think, honestly, it was high time I considered.

I love the way these movies show emotion; what I need to do is let myself show it in my own work. I am good at emotion, but I could be better; and the same goes for weird. It's too easy, when writing about Fairyland and vampires, to forget that it's believable and enjoyable for your characters to eat ketchup on plain rice or to post little love notes to themselves on the fronts of their cabinets. I claim to write fantasy about humans; it's time I really focused on what I think humans are about.

But there's some stuff in there for my personal life, as well. Someone I read regularly on the Internet recently announced a major change to the way they live their lives, and I felt inspired. I don't have the room to mix it up the way she did, but I can build toward the life I want to lead, and I think that doing that more—fulfilling my New Year's resolution and then a few more steps after that—would be good for me. I style myself an artist, but I don't always feel like it; so it's time to do the things that do feel that way. I want to connect with the world around me; so it's time I decided to connect. I want adventure; it's time to put on the fedora.

It's time to Get Excited and Make Things again. It's time to wear clothes that make me feel comfortable and inspired, and to break out the trusty if damaged Palm Treo so I can try the Flickr 365 idea that I hear is going around. It's time to leave myself little notes around the house and to treat my work like a game I get to win every day at 6. It's time to eat healthy, to move, to study and to practice. It's time to base the triumphs of my life on a more expansive checklist than "ate today and didn't get fired and maybe wrote".

This is probably raw, and overly navel-gazing, and most likely in bad need of some editing; but now that it's done, post-movie post-thinking, I feel like putting it out in the Internet is exactly the right way to go. It's time to embrace life again and see if it sticks this time; it's time to set sail for adventure, and see if I can bang a coin on a lamppost enough to make the sun come up.

Review: Paranormal Activity

Short version: HOMINA HOMINA HOMINA OH MY GOD STAIRS

Longer version: Sparse, diegetic style and meticulous attention to mood and pacing combine to scare the everloving bejeezus out of you. The single scariest movie I think I have ever seen, more haunting than Funny Games and with the same attention paid to the expectations of the genre.

Longest version (SPOILERS!)

Summary: The film presents a series of home-recorded video files taken by main characters Katie and Micah, a young upper-middle-class couple living in a nice San Diego home. Katie has apparently been plagued by strange paranormal experiences since her childhood, and Micah, ever the doting boyfriend, has decided to spend a ridiculous amount of money buying a camera with which to record these occult shenanigans (to what end is not always clear). So begins an uninterrupted festival of tension and terror that I am not sure I can truly do justice.

Paranormal Activity is one of a body of horror works that I wish I knew (or could safely invent) a fancy term for: films made by people who grew up with horror films, who know all the tricks of and expectations pertaining to the movies, and who use those expectations and that knowledge to manipulate their audience into an experience of real fright. Post-post-horror, if you will. The film's style owes a lot to The Blair Witch Project, obviously, but at the same time knocks it out of the water, focusing on a much more sparse, (mostly) subtle, believable story that is nevertheless just weird enough to be unsettling.

And unsettling it is, my friends. Terrifying, even. I and the rest of the theater spent most of the movie screaming; what periods of silence we had were punctuated by constant squeaks of "Oh God", and I several times slammed myself backwards into my seat while shouting—and I do not scream at movies as a rule. The film achieves its scares with minimal special effects and an amazing sense of pacing, starting small enough that I freaked myself out waiting for something to freak me out and then piling it on thicker and thicker as it went on. It doesn't try to explain itself; it doesn't pretend to make sense; it doesn't attempt to satisfy or resolve. It tells a story that is about two lives being wrecked by something no-one involved understands, and it tells that story in a way that makes it feel like it could happen to you. It renders an average environment terrifying, and creates the sense of something wholly outside acceptable reality with a minimum of special effects shenanigans for us overactive brains to deconstruct. Even beyond how scared I was, I have to praise the movie for using the found footage narrative framework with such acumen and style.

I will take this baby down off the pedestal and point out the clay foot, though: for all it is terrifying, Paranormal Activity is also a little conventional. Horror tropes stare the viewer right in the face, from Micah's overhyped male bravado to the deep need for somebody to read an explanation of the monster out of the book. Expectations are rewarded, though not always on the most comfortable schedule, and I think that does lessen the impact. At the same time, though, I can't think of a way to dodge those tropes that doesn't either leave the writer painted into a corner or look just as blatant in its avoidance and inversion as the use of those tropes was in the first place; and in truth, those old chestnuts are presented in such an inventive and generally believable manner that I don't think they do as much harm as they do when seen in lesser productions.

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All in all, I'm giving this baby five out of five horrifying noises in the middle of the night. I recommend it to any horror movie fan, and I really do think their tagline about not seeing it alone is true; you'll want somebody to share this experience with you, and you almost certainly do not want to try to make the drive home alone. I, myself, am alone now for the first time since seeing the movie on Friday, and I'm having trouble with the idea of going to sleep. Some part of me is expecting the weird noises to start as soon as I hit Post. Good thing I haven't been fighting with my girlfriend...

(And of course a plane flies overhead right as I go to hit Post, creating a dull metallic moan that made my head snap up with enough speed to compact some vertebrae. Thanks, universe, that's exactly what I needed.)

Review: 9

Very short version: Wow. I mean, wow. Wait, what?

Short version: A visually stunning, beautifully crafted, highly imaginative movie with a plot that would put even a five-year-old to sleep. Deeply enjoyable but almost doesn't need sound.

Long version, MIT SPOILER:

The summary: Nine unnerving and adorable rag dolls awaken to a world reduced to trash and rubble, and over the course of an hour and a half's storytelling uncover the truth about the world they have fallen into and their existence. One among them digs deeper than the others, unleashing something ancient and horrible and then righting his own wrong as best it can be righted, all leading to a conclusion that no-one understands but somehow involves Paracelsus.

I will start with the good: 9 is beautiful. Not traditional, statuesque, my-pants-are-tight beautiful, nor the kind that makes you warm inside; Shane Acker's vision is dark and alluring in a very unique way, a little steampunk, a little cyberpunk, a little good-old-fashioned punk. The movie turns everyday objects into fantastic creatures and contraptions—the only thing I couldn't identify, my girlfriend identified for me—and invests it all with a life and a horror that never seems to step outside the bounds of the objects thus incorporated.

The cinematography, likewise, must be praised. The backgrounds in this film are phenomenal, the action sequences exquisitely choreographed to make full use of the settings the characters are placed in, and the level of detail in everything is astounding without looking cluttered—or rather, without looking the bad kind of cluttered; 9's world is definitely way past its quota for junk.

In addition to the visuals, I have to praise this movie's vision. The dark future it depicts is archetypal enough for everyone to recognize it, but occupies a weird anachronistic space all its own; the process for creating the rag dolls and the history of the world up to the beginning of the narrative are clearly well-thought out; and the real-world ideas seem well-researched and brilliantly applied, and all of this background is only shoved down our throats when needed—there is plenty that is left tacit and implied for the viewer to unpack. All throughout the movie are little touches that show just how much thought and care went into this film. Acker clearly has a monumental imagination, and I look forward to seeing more from him.

However, this level of detail and thought is exactly why the one weak point is so overwhelming, and that weak point: the movie's story. Not the background, mind you—the background has a great deal of hidden depth—the actual plot of what occurs in the course of the movie. The plot is so basic that it can be predicted more or less from the get-go; it's like someone took Campbell's Hero's Journey and glued the contents of a junk drawer to it. We recognize the narrative elements as soon as they are introduced, watch for their usual applications, and are never once surprised at how things turn out.

There are twists, I suppose, in the form of unraveling the mysteries of what occurred prior to the rag dolls being created, and their creator's intentions for them, but those are never fully explored. What's more, the ending is unsatisfying in the extreme. While the triumph over the Big Bad and the release of those put into, as far as we can tell, perpetual torment are certainly a good denouement, the dark science and cool alchemical ideas of the rest of the movie suddenly become strange fairytale hand-waves. The movie clearly intends us to ask ourselves what happens next for the surviving rag dolls, but it doesn't care to explain why the talisman is unleashing some but not all of their souls into the air, nor why that makes it rain, nor why the raindrops are teeming with little green soul-bits. (As one of my co-viewers put it, "What I learned today is that bacteria are the souls of old people." If you're reading this despite spoiler warnings, you have to watch to understand; I can't make it make sense.)

END SPOILERS.

But the weak plot aside, 9 is in no way a bad movie. The visuals and imagination that went into it are stunning, and while the story's progression is weak the ideas behind it are so originally executed, if not wholly original, that I can't see fit to have much complaint with the movie overall. I give it four out of five scissor-beaked creatures from my nightmares. I enjoyed it greatly, and gasped in wonder in some places, and I fully plan on owning this baby on DVD.

Yes, I will be the terrible parent who shows this to their children. Did you expect anything less from me?

Review: Inglourious Basterds

Short version: Jesus H. Christ with butter sauce, I think I just let Quentin Tarantino get to third base with my brainstem.

Longer version: Tarantino being unabashedly Tarantino; a playful, funny, dark, utterly psychotic film that will leave you amused, confused, bemused, and probably in need of some bleach. Highly recommended for Pitt, Waltz, and Roth alone.

Longest version: SPOILERS AHEAD!
"Donny! We got a German here wants to die for his country...oblige him!"

Thus did I know that I was truly in a Tarantino movie.

Plot summary, in case you need it: Three stories about World War II and its consequences collide in Nazi-occupied France. In one story, SS officer Hans Landa kills some Jews as only a Nazi in a Nazi movie can kill them (which is to say, horribly) and establishes himself as our villain, and then goes about his business as the "Jew Hunter" of France. In another story, the survivor of Landa's initial massacre discovers the perfect opportunity for some psychotic revenge when Joseph Goebbels decides to hold the opening of his latest film in her little French cinema. And in yet a third story, Brad Pitt plays a maniacal hayseed who recruits a group of Jewish-American soldiers to help him terrorize the Nazis via methods you would expect from the man who brought us Reservoir Dogs.

Yes, that's right. Those guys in the preview are one of three stories; turns out, that story in the preview? Maybe 30 minutes out of this entire movie. Also there's Hitler.

Tarantino is in many ways at the top of his game here. His use of the camera is masterful, drawing out tense scenes and then snapping scenes we expect to be tense to a sudden and disturbing conclusion. He uses visual cues and tropes from a variety of genres and grounds of interpretation the way a little kid uses Legos, stacking them together in unexpected ways (look at which character gets the Sherlock Holmes imagery and see if that makes you wonder who the good guys are). He plays with his audience's expectations right from the get-go, giving us a movie that forces us to engage and to second- and third-guess ourselves. And we're pretty much never right.

The actors...this wouldn't be the same without the actors. Pitt is astounding as Lt. Aldo Raine, giving him a comical accent that does not diminish his boisterous psychosis, and painting a picture of a man so consumed with hate that he rather upsettingly not very different from the guys he's butchering. Roth does a great turn as Donny Donowitz, aka "The Bear Jew", a gleefully psychotic young Jewish man undergoing the most brutal sort of catharsis. And Christoph Waltz is stunning as Hans Landa; I cannot begin to do this character justice. I want to write a paper just on the character of Landa, and I think that's the highest praise I can give.

This is also Tarantino at his most playful, and I don't say that lightly of the man who actually traced a square behind Thurman's fingers in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino takes a hammer to the fourth wall near the beginning of Act Two and never stops, inserting narration in two random scenes and giving important characters nametags you'd expect from a 70's action show. This movie is almost excessive in the degree to which it plays with its medium; it comes right out and tells you that he is Quentin Tarantino, and he will do whatever the fuck he wants.

If I had a complaint against this movie, it's that I'm not sure it needed to be three hours long. While I won't fault him for his decisions with drawing out more tense scenes (Chapter One is especially beautiful in this respect), there are a few places where I think he could have stood to up the pace a little bit. It is possible that this was me being jarred by getting something other than Pulp Fiction meets Wolfenstein out of this movie, however, and I am prepared to take that statement back upon a more thoughtful viewing.

Also, a warning: This is a god-damn Quentin Tarantino movie. No, really. A man is beaten to death with a baseball bat. A knife is buried in someone's neck. Multiple Nazis are scalped. A bullet hole...you don't want me to spoil the bullet hole. And the body count is astounding for its number and its content. While the violence is contained to a handful of scenes, its lack of length is made up for in level of brutality. And the worst(?) part? You'll probably laugh at some of it. You have been warned.

END WHAT SPOILERS THERE ARE

All in all, I would recommend this movie highly to anyone with a stomach for Tarantino's love of violence. The acting is great, the cinematography superb, and you can tell everyone involved was having an unmitigated barrel of fun. I give this four out of five bloody head-swastikas; now go watch it and see what the hell I mean.

In Defense of Dollhouse

Earlier this year, I was a bit of a sheep. I heard from others, others I trust and love, that Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's newest addition to his long television resume, was distinctly Not Very Good. And so, not having television, I did not bother to seek it out. I dodged viewings at friends' houses and chances to use Hulu and generally stayed uninformed. The one episode I caught was already half over, and so more than a wee bit confusing, which did not help things.

However, these sorts of ignorance do not last in my world; a visit to a friend's house birthed a chance to see the first and second episodes, and so watch I did. And I saw enough there that I had to wonder: Was I misinformed? Were my tastes so different? So I ordered the DVD set when it came out, and returned from vacation to find a telltale package sitting on my doorstep.

That was Thursday. I finished Season One of Dollhouse last night.

Those who know me well, know that this is a prodigious event. Much as I love the television medium I am not a person who can sit and watch for more than a handful of hours at a time. So when I say I spent all of Friday either writing or watching Dollhouse, you know how riveted I was. I was not willing to believe for a long time; but now I'm pretty sure I think this is the best show Joss Whedon has yet produced—which is only natural, given that it's born of experience.

Now, I'm not saying those who didn't like it are wrong; I'm not going to try to account for taste just because I have a blog. And I'll admit, I am a drooling Whedon fanboy, so a certain amount of this could be me playing the apologist. But, for those who are interested in what I think, I present a defense of, and primer for, Joss Whedon's Dollhouse...and in the process, hope to explicate what might be bugging the Whedonites about this one.

First, and I cannot stress this enough: Dollhouse is not Buffy. It will never be Buffy, and it doesn't want to be. This is, I think, at the root of a lot of why this show bothers so many; there are fundamental differences between this show and Whedon's previous work that may seem disruptive, or cause false assumptions. Most of the rest of this entry is taken up on what makes it different, so if that doesn't interest you I'll understand if you stop reading.

Dollhouse is darker than Buffy. This is the most important break from tradition: Joss has painted this story a shade darker than his previous ones. That's not to say that the Buffyverse never dealt with adult topics...but when the closest thing to a comic relief episode starts with a man beating himself to death on a windowpane, you know you're in for a different sort of ride.

Dollhouseis more adult than Buffy. This is separate from "darker", but similar. The themes of the Buffyverse shows were maturation and responsibility—learning to deal with the multifarious burdens of life, first as a teenager becoming an adult and then later as an adult who has not learned nearly as much as they think they have. The themes of Firefly were family and the conflict between security and freedom. The themes of Dollhouse are not more important or better, but they are more complicated—the nature of humanity, memory vs. personality, and the massive political conflict between what the Dollhouse can do and what it is trying to do. The story also leaves a lot more gray areas than the previous shows have, and it doesn't seem interested in giving us definite answers.

Dollhouse's ensemble is not where you think it is. Much noise has been made about the problem of Echo as the main character, and the lack of connection the audience feels with her due to her overall dearth of character growth. But while there is plenty of plot surrounding Echo and the nature of the dolls, and while Eliza Dushku's face graces our DVD boxed set...she is not part of the Whedon-trademark "ensemble cast". For that, look to Topher, and Boyd, and DeWitt, and the rest of the crew working behind the scenes at the Dollhouse (further information withheld to avoid avoid possible spoilers). The Actives are ciphers, mirrors that reflect the growth and change within the "normal" human characters; they are not there to be loved in and of themselves, except perhaps in the way pets are loved, they are there to show us what to love and hate about everyone else.

Dollhouse moves slower, but steadier. I love the first season of Dollhouse partially because it is such a taut, well-paced show, as compared to the longer and occasionally more sprawling Buffy seasons. Every episode of this show has a little bit more plot, even if it's just a tidbit; you wouldn't necessarily notice if you watched the season out of order (with the exception of a couple key episodes, which is fairly common in Joss's works). Buffy, with its 22-episode seasons, had a little more room to wiggle; with Dollhouse, thirteen episodes means it has to pack a little plot into everything. But it still peels slowly, like an onion, and for that I love it.

Dollhouse isn't funny, but Dollhouse is witty. This is a very important distinction. Joss is an excellent writer of banter, and he encourages that in his writers; but just because he's not being funny doesn't mean he isn't writing banter. The exchanges between the characters here are fast and sharp and witty, and they deliver a surprising amount of information without the annoying reveal-dumps that stud so many Mutant Enemy imitators. Enjoy the wit. Steep in the wit. Recognize it's clever. Don't wait for a punchline, and the few they do have will shine that much brighter.

That's all I have to say in its defense. I genuinely think the first season of Dollhouse is a masterpiece—witty, taut, and masterfully executed—and I hope that with this primer, you might see it that way, too. If you don't, I hope you at least enjoyed Buffy.

Like Ice Cubes in My Sternum: Funny Games

This might technically be a review. But I can't call it a review. Because I can't talk about it with you yet.

I spoke a few posts back about my attitude about the flinch; about getting up and walking around, about being so upset that one had to turn away. I spoke about my unwillingness to do so.

There is now, officially, a film that made me wish I could. And just as I was wishing I could this movie prevented me from doing so.

There is a movie. A remake, really, by the same director, shot for shot. The movie is called Funny Games. It stars Naomi Watts. It stars Tim Roth. It stars Michael Pitt. And it stars your stomach being punched as hard as it can by the Abominable Snowman.

I cannot explain this movie. I cannot explain this movie because to explain this movie is to rob it of some of its power over you. Though that isn't saying much; I went in with a skull full of lit theory and some vague idea of what the film was about, and I was still skewered through the brainstem and anchored to my chair.

This movie is, as best I can describe it, Brechtian horror. It is a movie about violence, and about what violence really does to someone, and about what we'd really do when faced with a monster. And this movie will never make facing that easy for you.

This movie conquers you. This movie plays with the medium, and this movie plays with you. This movie molests you; it makes you watch, and it makes you feel bad for watching. This movie is about how easy it is now to watch someone be disemboweled; and when you're done this movie will make you wish that was all it was. But it doesn't need special effects do it; it really doesn't. Everything about this movie is here to make you uncomfortable; viscerally, spiritually, deeply uncomfortable. This movie makes you question the media in a way you never considered.

Carpenter. Hooper. Craven. These men are great filmmakers, and they make classic films. They made horror films.

But the director of Funny Games made horror.

Watch it. Or rather, don't watch it. Because you don't watch Funny Games. You survive it.

The gauntlet is thrown. Pick it up.

Review: REPO! the Genetic Opera

This movie came out in 2008 and is available on DVD.

It is a rock opera set in a dystopian future where "Repo Men" commit legalized organ theft. It starts Anthony Stewart Head, Paul Sorvino, Paris Hilton, and one of the founding members of Skinny Puppy.

That should be all the review you need.

In all sincerity, REPO! is tongue-in-cheek heavy-metal operatic fun. It lacks depth in several places, and the narrative is by and large an opera standard; but it's in the meat of it and in the sheer ballsiness of the idea that the film stands out. The visuals are great, the acting is wonderful, and the music is generally very good (though I feel like a plebeian for feeling like the meter is kind of off in parts of the earlier numbers). Moreover, it's got a Gothic quirkiness to it that I just don't see enough places anymore, and I cannot help but encourage it. Really, how can you argue with Anthony Stewart Head in a leather trenchcoat, singing a hard rock song while performing surgery without anesthetic?

I give this movie four out of five strange hybrids of a scalpel and a melee weapon. It'll cost you the price of a rental or a slot in your Netflix queue; give it a try and discover that sometimes you have to spell awesome in all caps.

Review: Up

The short, spoiler-free version: Pixar's still got it. Up is an adorable, heart-tugging, hilarious and sometimes tear-inducing story hewn from a brick of pure wonder; if you cannot find something in this movie to make you smile, you should stop trying so hard to grow up.

Now, the longer version...

[PAUSE FOR SPOILERS


It has a talking dog and a zeppelin. Sold!

The story, in a nutshell: An old man, recently widowed and having trouble navigating modern life, decides to abandon modern life and have the adventure he and his wife always wanted, with a little help from hundreds of balloons. He is accompanied by a lawyer-friendly Boy Scout, a talking dog, and a giant bird; and learns, in the end, that the greatest adventures of all take place inside.

In all sincerity, as much of a Pixar fanboy as I am generally, Up is truly an amazing film. Pixar pulls out all the stops for this one, down to the tiniest detail, and produces something truly magical.

The visuals are, of course, astounding; Pixar has outdone themselves yet again in the visual department, creating a vision of South America and of the inside of an old man's home that genuinely left me in awe. Their characters are beautifully animated, and perhaps more importantly, subtly animated; so much of the story is told through facial expressions, gestures, and interaction with the environment (I squeed a little every time Carl put his hand on the mailbox) that I might forget the film was animated if the animation wasn't so beautiful. The sequence showing Carl and Ellie's courtship and marriage is truly breathtaking in its capacity to show, without a single line of audible dialog, the entirety of a couple's lives together.

Second only to the animation, though, are the characters. Just because their animators are so talented does not mean Pixar has shirked on their writing staff; the characters and events in this film are vivid and fully realized. Watching the character of Carl progress from the start of the film to the end, I was put in mind of actually seeing a time-lapse biography of some very real person who happened to look like two boxes stacked on top of each other. And the portrayal of his romance with Ellie was simply adorable.

The story...well, the story is where this movie might fall flat if it were a different movie. The plot itself is nicely organic and ties together well, but there are a few plot holes (the science teacher I saw this with had some choice comments about the buoyancy and staying power of helium balloons) and one or two places where characters were left holding the Idiot Ball (why would you fly your house to South America and not lock all your doors?). However, nitpicking like this is nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking; because if you're worried about this stuff, you are missing the point.

Up is not a movie about the real world. Up is a movie about wonder and adventure. Things happen not because they are realistic, but because they are beautiful or dramatic or sweet; the story running on mythological logic. From the moment Carl and Ellie's home floats away using a chimney full of balloons and two bedsheets, we have left the Campbellian world of the every day and moved to something far more likely to make us grin; and the wonder of the South American adventure ends with the sweet and utterly tear-jerking touch of a shot of their house, exactly where Ellie always dreamed it would be. They are the front and back covers of a fairytale, conveniently placed so you know when to enjoy the ride through a child's eyes.

And really, that's what this movie is about. This movie is about wonder, and all the little places you can find it, and our tendency to let life pass by without wonder, or to let the wonder in your lives pass us by without remark. It's about obsessing over little details of the past and refusing to see the amazing things happening in front of you (Charles Muntz being the totemic representation thereof—watch the events during the climactic battle), and the smile that comes to your face when you realize, as Mr. Incredible said a few Pixar films back, that sometimes the people you love are your greatest adventure.

Before I give up on spoilers, I have to end by saying, I am continually astounded by how dark Pixar is willing to wax in its films. Up has an implied miscarriage and/or fertility problem, complete with utterly depressed couple, a sad stunned man sitting at a funeral, and as far as I can tell the first on-screen depiction of blood in a Pixar film (caused by the main character, no less). It's not bad, by any means—I am an advocate of people, kids included, being forced into seeing the ups and downs of life, and it certainly gives extra lift to the joy of leaving the everyday—but it is surprising to me that they get away with it. Frankly, it gives me a little hope for the future of kid's entertainment, which is sorely lacking after some of this movie's previews...


[PAUSE TO END SPOILERS]

In the end, this is more of the Pixar magic, come to startling 3-D life. It is a beautiful movie for both child and adult, and you should probably consider bringing some Kleenex. It is odd to think that this is de rigeur for Pixar...but it is, and I hope it never stops, because it's good to know that someone in this world places such a high value on wonder.

Review: The One-Eyed Man is King

Right, Mr. Blog. You're a writer's blog, it's time you occasionally start acting like one; and since we can't be arsed to keep better tabs on current releases in fiction we'll have to do the next best thing and talk about theater.

Thursday night, as I was settling in for a bit of pre-writing dinner, I received a text message from a friend, telling me that her housemate was in a play on Friday night, and asking: would I like to come? Being thirsty for adventure, I said "Yes, absolutely". The production in question was the Phoenix Theater's production of Carter W. Lewis's The One-Eyed Man is King; and as of now, there is no level on which I regret having taken up my friend's offer.

My experience with independent theater has been resolutely binary: either the play is superlative and I start earmarking actors for futures on Broadway or in Hollywood, or I leave knowing exactly why this play and those actors are things one's never heard of. I am elated to say that this play is the former.

The One-Eyed Man is King is, like all the best kinds of art, something that is only knowable through the experience of it; a plot summary wouldn't be so much at risk of spoiling the fun as it would be at risk of making no sense or seeming silly without the actors, the space, the experience of viewing to drive it. So I will say it briefly: The One-Eyed Man is King is a play about a blind burglar, the alcoholic rich woman whom he attempts to rob, and their small, broken families. But of course, also like all great art, the play is much more.

The script is fantastic: witty without being wacky, deeply insightful and intelligent, and poignant without delving into the ugly arty minimalism that seems to plague so many plays that want to tell a moral. Likewise, the Phoenix Theatre's use of its space is superb: the actors, the positioning, the lighting are all used to create a real, immersive three-dimensional space, in which the audience can understand all the necessary data to know what is going on and enjoy the play, but find new details depending upon where they look. It seems like such a basic thing, but this cast and crew does it in a way that begs repeated viewings to see what I missed.

If I haven't mentioned the actors in detail, it's because I saved the best for last. All plays depend on their actors, but The One-Eyed Man is King is a script that lives or dies on the strength of its cast—and this cast makes it into something superlative. Andi Trindle makes the rich woman dysfunctional and distressed in a way that is so real it makes the viewer's guts twist; her daughter-in-law (Allie Jones) is a believable portrait of the kind of emotional half-logic that powers teenagers (and really most people) in distress; and the thief's father (Michael Moerman) oozes wisdom, smarm, and raunch in equal amounts, without ever being anything short of lovable. And while I don't want to suggest the others were anything short of amazing, Dan Wilson's portrayal of the thief had to be one of the linchpins of this play. I cannot imagine the level of training it took for him to never quite look anybody in the face while he spoke; and his delivery of the thief's lines (if not the wittiest character the one most prone to spewing witticisms) brings the character to a real, unique life.

The One-Eyed Man is King could easily have been arty trash, a slice-of-life burrito without anything of substance in the middle; but instead, the Phoenix Theater and its players delivers a powerful and entertaining performance. If you're in the San Francisco area while it's running, do yourself a favor and go see it; tickets are $20, and there are shows this weekend and next, as well as a run on Thursday the 28th. Details are available at www.phoenixtheatresf.org; and if you liked it make sure to tell your social networking tools, as these guys run (somewhat admirably) on word of mouth. It's really worth all the effort.

(Brief) Movie Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

The short, spoiler-free version: X-Men Origins: Wolverine is to the X-Men films what the character of Wolverine is to the X-Men comics: a rather absurd addition, but an endlessly entertaining one, a pure action movie with none of that nasty character development to get in the way of some truly epic special effects and fight choreography.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

I can sum up the glory of Wolverine in three words: Retractable. Adamantium. Katanas.

The character of Wolverine has always been the heavy metal element of the group, that archetypal bad boy who everyone loves so much that he is the most obvious and up-front bastion of the X-Men team's obligatory comic book absurdities. He's over a century old, he's indestructible, he's got unbreakable diamond-hard claws, he chomps cigars and he's been both a mercenary and a samurai. He is the unabashed effort to be everything that the Marvel writers think is SO TOTALLY AWESOME, and this movie, in that sense, does him justice.

There's a plot to the movie, but it doesn't matter. There are characters, they have conflicts, but it doesn't matter. What matters is watching Hugh Jackman be a stoic, occasionally-roaring badass, and Liev Schreiber chewing the scenery and acting psycho, and Ryan Reynolds quipping while deflecting bullets with swords.

While Schreiber is an excellent actor, and Jackman gives Wolverine the life he actually needs, the real star of this movie is the special effects and the cinematography. The movie's flow is hollow, filled with so many action movie cliches that you could write it by hitting Random Item on TV Tropes (who thinks they can get away with the Slow Walk Away From Exploding Vehicle shot anymore?), but the action sequences are an over-the-top, unapologetic exercise in making you go "Awesome!" People reload their guns by tossing them up in the air, people ride on the tops of out of control helicopters, people have retractable adamantium katanas embedded in their hands. It is so over the top I could not help but laugh, but I really think that's the point. Wolverine does not mince words, it does not put on an act for you. Wolverine wants you to laugh and shout and pump your fist, and god-damn-it, it is going to make you do that as best it can.

END SPOILERS.


I don't need to discuss the movie's flaws; they are part and parcel of what I just discussed. Nothing in the movie will move you, or enrich you, or make you think. The script's occasional efforts at being deep are either the ghosts of a more emotional script or brief nods to the fact that there are actually some real actors in among the CGI and explosives, and what isn't predictable in the plot is totally insane. But this is not a movie that is about that. This movie is pure rock n' roll pulp, and while it is neither the first nor the best, it is definitely worth one viewing just to see it build a whole new top to go over.

Review: Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy

Review, the short version: Read it, and be changed, and never, ever argue with me about the Cthulhu Mythos.

Preface to the long version: I am well aware of Rudyard Kipling's political and social leanings, and the degree to which he was both more extreme than, and sadly sometimes only as extreme as, his contemporaries. I do not agree with nor condone his beliefs, but reading his fiction is not the same as condoning his politics. I hope in vain that this might put a rest to this argument, but I don't expect to put out the chemical fire that is the Internet.

Now, the long version.

Kipling is one of those great writers I am ashamed to admit I have not read much of; beyond the obvious and regrettable Disney exposure I have read a little bit of his Just So Stories. So when I was given a chance to read a collection of his work specifically aimed at my preferred genre(s) via the power of the Christmas present, I jumped at it.

What I read rearranged my brain and took my breath away.

Kipling is, simply put, a master of English prose, and this book captures not only some of his most, but some of the most, inventive stories. "The Mark of the Beast" and "The Man Who Would Be King" are, of course, classics, considered some of Kipling's strongest work; but this book is not merely an excuse to reprint those pieces. Kipling's work here is genuinely masterful, and masterful in a way I do not often attribute to such a clear precursor of later, more prominent works; because while I didn't expect it, I have to trace inspiration, if not origination, of some of the greatest works of speculative fiction back to Kipling. "On the Gate: A Tale of '16" peeks through a good bit in Neil Gaiman; "Wireless" reminds me of Tim Powers; and "A Matter of Fact" predates Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" by a good thirty years; and both of them are not only inspirational, but fantastic stories in their own right.

These are not the highest points in the book, either: "The Finest Story in the World" is beautiful and amusing, and "The Brushwood Boy" pulled at my heart and my tear-ducts. But all of them are worth something, even just a wry smile; there are no low points in this collection.

Or at least, there are no low points that are a fault of Kipling. The only trouble I had with this edition (Pegasus Books, 2008) was its copyediting; it is, in a word, abysmal. Some of this may be idiosyncrasies of Kipling's grammar that I am just too post-Strunk to understand, but it seems in most places like the editorial process was simply ignored; I often found myself having to go back and re-read sections of stories just to understand what Kipling was trying to say. There are worse things in the world than having to re-read Kipling, certainly, but I should not be doing it out of typographic necessity.

All in all, this is going to be a tough book to beat for my favorite of the year, and it will be going on my Inspiration Shelf for those nights when the words are gummed up. If you are a reader, I recommend it; and if you want to write urban fantasy, I'd call it mandatory.

Movie Reviews: Watchmen

First off, let me correct some misconceptions about this film that I have heard bandied about the Internet.

• This is not an action movie. Girls in latex doesn't equal action. (Feel free to make an inappropriate joke before moving on to the next bullet.)


• This is not a superhero movie. This is an anti-superhero movie.


• The book and the movie are different and stand alone, making the same points. I love them both for different reasons and will always, always, regard Moore and Gibbons' graphic novel as the more groundbreaking work, for all the obvious reasons.


• No intelligent person should be as hung up as this planet has become on Dr. Manhattan's penis.

Now, it is time for actual review.

WARNING: I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO SPOIL THE MOVIE FROM HERE ON OUT. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.



Short overview: I love Watchmen; I think it's a fantastic graphic novel. It is not flawless, but no great work is, and we have it to thank for the way the modern world thinks about the superhero. This film says the same things the book does, but it manages to say them in a way that is unique to film as a medium, and to say them in a way that is still true to the book while being freshened up for our times. If I had to pick one negative word to say about this movie, it is "confusing".

Now, let's dig into the meat.

The music. Whoever did this soundtrack should be proud; they managed to choose songs that were appropriately evocative and that blended well with the scenes they accompanied. I was never lost during the flashbacks because all the pieces, while they may not have actually been written and published/made famous during the era being portrayed, evoked the era strongly enough for me to know when things were happening even without being certain of my Watchmen trivia.

The cinematography. I was a bit annoyed when the prison break and the gang fight both turned into action sequences; but when the gore and the brutality really started coming through in full frontal color, I got what Snyder was doing: he was using action-movie cinematography to bring across the brutality and dysfunction in a way that comic books could not. This kept happening to me throughout the film: a scene that in the comics was unsettling but possible to gloss over was impossible not to engage with in the film, from Big Picture's minion getting his arms sawed off to the Comedian shooting his pregnant girlfriend in the face. And while his need for a slow-motion sex scene in every movie is a little bit annoying during the love scene in Archie, I can forgive that for the breathtaking way he handled the opening montage and credit sequence.

The actors. Billy Crudup did an amazing job of playing the alien ubermensch Dr. Manhattan; Patrick Wilson brought across the nerdy, awkward, kind, yet dysfunctional personality of Nite Owl with flair; Jeffrey Dean Morgan was sublime as the Comedian, who had the psychopathic, self-aware little grin that I always loved; and then there was Jackie Earle Haley, who I will hope and pray to get nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Rorschach. His voice, his mannerisms, his entire style was amazing: he brought a disarming life to Rorschach's final moments that surpassed the same scene in the comics. Hint for second viewings: Watch the motion of his cheeks.

The ending. Yes, it was changed; but in some ways I really liked this change. I won't say it made more sense, because that feels blasphemous, but I will say that I found it allowed them to drop a couple small things (though the presence of Bubastis now makes almost no sense), and it made some of the events of the book feel more synchronized and blended than it did in the book (the shot of an angry Dr. Manhattan used by a newcaster near the end of the movie made me feel like Ozymandias was even more of a genius).

The one negative thing I will say about this film is that it has a very high barrier to entry for those who have not read the book. My friends who saw the film with me had no frame of reference for some of its flashbacks, and so were trying to pick up on the fly the ways to identify when those flashbacks were occurring relative to the main narrative, which can't have been that much fun. I think that it is one of the ways in which Snyder worked a little too hard to make this a film for the fans--as a fan I loved it, but he created a major problem for himself by tying it so closely to the book.



END SPOILERS

All in all, Watchmen is definitely a DVD purchase, and worth the money to see in the theater.

Now, let me take just a moment to talk about Dr. Manhattan's penis.

People, shut up about this. Penises are not new, penises are not bad, penises are not that interesting. It is a CGI dick. You're wasting air and bandwidth on some lines of code.

We have gone through about a century of movies, and a large portion of that has included women baring their breasts and/or genitals; can we get over the fact that in this movie had a penis in it? Your jokes about the big blue cock are not particular funny, and the idea that this is groundbreaking really just makes me a little annoyed. I just hope that what movie producers get from this is the idea that full-frontal male nudity is acceptable in mainstream film, because while I don't crave pictures of other mens' genitalia I think it's time that our Puritan roots get pruned.

Movie Review: Coraline

I am an admitted fanatic of Neil Gaiman; I have not call myself a real aficionado of Henry Selick only because I haven't gone beyond the pedestrian level of familiarity with his work. However, having seen this, I think I have to start wearing that title and digging through IMDB for further evidence of his greatness.

For those unfamiliar, I present Coraline in lightly spoiled synopsis format: The titular young girl encounters a chilling otherworld version of her home and her family, and uncovers the mystery of a rickety pink boarding house planted in the middle of some rocks, hills, and mud. Special Guests: A dig at writers and the world's most adorable rodents.

Now, let me answer the two questions I know we're all asking. For those who work for the Chicago Tribune or who somehow got here from Yahoo Answers: Tim Burton has nothing to do with this movie. Henry Selick adapted Tim Burton's idea to the big screen to bring us The Nightmare Before Christmas. This is not a Tim Burton movie, or a Tim Burton idea; indeed, as far as I can tell, Tim Burton's only connection to this film is via one of the previews.

To the rest of the populous, the other, bigger question: Yes. Henry Selick did a marvelous job of adapting the book. He captured the rainy-day-crawlspace beauty of Gaiman's original piece, and added his own, almost antique level of wonder to the experience. Things changed, but none of it spoils the experience.

Now then, to draw back the CURTAIN OF SPOILERS OH MY GOD IF YOU READ THIS YOU WITHDRAW ALL RIGHT TO HATE ME


Still with me? Good.
I will not waste your time with dissection of the story as a whole. For one thing, that would by and large be a book review, and a book review of a novel which has been on the market for some time. For another, overviews of Gaiman's stories rarely have much new to be said about them. Gaiman is a master of sculpting new flesh and muscle onto very old bones, and Coraline is no exception. When laid out on the table the story is quite unsurprising—a sort of coming-of-age through acceptance of one's parents as three-dimensional creatures with their ups and their downs, a moving away from (but not entirely out of) the shadow world of the strange and the unknowable. Instead, I would like to focus on what sets Coraline apart from its sister narratives; and on those story elements Mr. Selick chose to alter, some of which I do not entirely agree with.

Let me start with some of the good things, and among those, let me start with the voice-acting. Oh my sweet candy-flipping God, the voice-acting. The film is a cavalcade of voices who tap-dance here and there through the limelight without ever staying for long. Ian McShane's voice disappears into the Eastern European accent of Mr. Bobinsky, and manages to tickle the funny bone without ever punching it desperately the way some actors might have; Robert Bailey Jr. gives off just the right prepubescent creepiness as Wybie; Keith "the Baritone" David lends sly not-quite-heroics to the part of the cat; and John Hodgman does a spectacular turn as both versions of Coraline's father. But the real kudos here have to go to Teri Hatcher, who gives a weary, worried, desperately sarcastic life to Coraline's mother, and a cold, artificial, horrifying bipolarity to the beldam.

And the visuals! I do not have enough positive adjectives for the visuals. "Phantasmagoric" comes to mind, as do "hypnotic", "transcendent", and the truest permutation of "awesome". His interpretation of Coraline's world is beautiful in a way that differed sharply from my own, but which I found nonetheless beautiful and acceptable; it is a world where the people are weird and the supernatural is weirder. Selick manages to make the Other World look staged and fabricated without directly calling attention to the fact that it, quite literally, is, and his use of the button motif for the beldam's powers manages to be cute without succumbing to the role of narrative hammer. The animation team's love for the art form is evident in every one of the shots, their little details and their inspired gloom. I could list off every little touch I loved most, from the care with which he echoed and warped every detail of both houses to the component parts of the beldam's true form, but I'd go on for pages. I will say, though, that the sequences in the Other Garden and the jumping mouse circus are must-sees for anyone who wants to call themselves puppeteer or animator.

Now, let me take a moment to detract. Perhaps this is memory giving the book a generous patina, but I am not sure I like some of the spark Selick took from the character of Coraline. Gaiman's Coraline was a hero of great brain and great heart; she resisted the beldam's efforts to enslave her without showing fear, and lured the beldam's hand quite deliberately to the old well. This aspect of her is seen in the way in which she rescues her parents, but overall the cinematic Coraline seems much more selfish and lost than she did in the novel, and I feel this dulls the message somewhat.

Then again, giving Coraline obvious good and bad sides puts her in the same field with her parents, who both clearly display negative and positive traits (though her father's good side doesn't wholly shine through until the end of the film; her mother gets her moment before the climax even starts). The film's message is much more about accepting people wholecloth, rather than trying to pick and choose personality traits, where the book was largely about growing up and establishing independence without needing to reject those who take care of you. The book, in other words, is about people a bit younger than those in the film; and I do not think it suffers for that.



**THE SPOILER CURTAIN HAS FALLEN**



But these thoughts all come to me long after the fact. The truth is, Coraline is not a movie to be watched with an eye toward meaning, and I say that not to defend vapidity but to encourage you to let it sink in. The watcher should go in with their mind open and emptied, and just let Selick and Gaiman fill it for two or so hours. It is a movie with consistent tastes and looks and feels, a movie that evokes moods perfectly. It is a movie that captures the weird way a child views a small town, the strange behaviors of little girls and little boys, and the double-edged truths about the people we know and love. It is a movie that begs to be experienced, and that does nothing but reward those who do so. Selick has done a marvelous job bringing Gaiman's book to the big screen, and even the parts I disagree with I can appreciate and understand.

Short version: see Coraline. You will not be disappointed.

Book Review: The Graveyard Book

I will confess without shame: I am a Neil Gaiman fanboy. I was introduced to him through the usual medium of The Sandman, then ate up Smoke and Mirrors shortly thereafter. In college I found my way to Neverwhere; then came American Gods, and the rest is really history. I have thoroughly drunk the Kool-Aid, and when I sit down with one of his books I expect nothing less than the superlative.

So please, hear me when I say how exceptional The Graveyard Book is.

The premise is simple, but where it goes is amazing. As Gaiman himself put it at a reading, The Graveyard Book is The Graveyard Book for the same reason The Jungle Book is The Jungle Book. In The Jungle Book, a boy's parents die and he runs off into the jungle, where he lives with the animals and learns the things animals know; in The Graveyard Book, a boy;s parents die and he runs off into a graveyard, where he lives with the dead people and learns the things dead people know. I cannot put it better than that, except to say that it is also about witches, and ghouls, and a man called Jack, and the difference, so rarely put down on paper, between the living and the dead. But more than any of these things, it is a return to stories we should have been reading all this time.

It is, in many ways, typical Gaiman: Sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, lovingly acerbic and generally lyrical. Gaiman straddles the line between British comico-surrealism and Lovecraftian horror, and it is definitely in evidence here: every headstone the main character walks by comes with the dates and epitaph in parentheses, and one of the story's many monsters is a caricature of a foreign grandmother, right down to the horrid, ur-ethnic cooking. He uses the fantastic to talk about everyday life--Bod Owens' journey from 2 to 16 over the book's course will remind every reader, especially the men, of what it was like to be "that age". But what Gaiman has done here that I think is extraordinary can be encapsulated thusly: The Graveyard Book is being marketed as a children's book.

That in and of itself is not extraordinary, but one has to consider the content. Chapter 1 starts with both of the main character's parents dead. Not simply dead, though; murdered. By a man who, the story does not fail to tell us, plans to murder the little boy next. In fact, the initial hook for the story is the man Jack's pursuit of the little boy, along with some indications that the man Jack may be more than just a gentleman with black hair and a detached willingness to go about slaughtering little boys. From there, the story is wall-to-wall dead people, with a few stops in to introduce multiple sorts of monsters, the details of what happens during a witch trial, necrophagia, and incessant reminders that there is someone who very much wants Bod Owens dead (which launches some of the more interesting philosophy about why Bod should remain alive, a question that I'm sure the adults will ask).

And all this in a children's book; a genre that, generally speaking, has been a stomping ground for the most pernicious sorts of Moral Guardians, the people who seem to think that any indication the world is anything short of a perfumed Eden where we frolic 'neath candy-cane skies is going to turn the children out, in some way, "wrong"; people who, he said from a place of terminal education, have clearly never heard about what happened to Siddhartha. (Or maybe they have...)

What I am reminded of by The Graveyard Book, more than anything else, perhaps even more than the Kipling work it clearly takes its influence from, is the Brothers Grimm. The fairy tales with mild swearing and bits being chopped off; the stories that taught children that the world can be both bloody and fascinating, that the darkness is to be feared but also sometimes confronted. Stories about the real world and the really fantastic world; stories that don't always try to echo life, but that succeed at doing so a great deal more effectively than the spun-sugar creations of Disney and its various tendrils.

As should be obvious, I hate this. I hate how insipid books for young adults are; I hate this notion, in America at least, that children need their realities watered down for them, and that reading about anything more extreme than a slightly sped-up merry-go-round is going to leave them either shooting up drugs or knifing prostitutes at age thirteen. Not only does it leave children unprepared for some of the harsh truths of the world--though I know no-one likes to think their children will have to deal with those--but it leads to the conceit, pervasive even among the children of voracious readers, that reading is boring.

I do not think that Gaiman has solved this; don't hear me saying that; and I realize that the Brothers Grimm were themselves censors and bowdlerizers. I realize, also, that The Graveyard Book is to stories like the Grimms' Cinderella what Splenda is to a bag of Circus Animals. But in making this a childrens' book, Gaiman has gone a step farther along the path already laid out by writers like J.K. Rowling; a path which seems to lead, not to the pap that is "young adult horror", but to the idea that we can tell our children stories that don't shelter or condescend. To the idea that our children can handle some darkness, and the idea that reading about violence won't make a child violent.

It's a small step--the damage done by Disney, and yes, by people like Perrault and the Grimms, will take a long time to be undone. But in addition to being compelling, and poetic, and darkly charming, the thing which most touched me about the Graveyard Book is that it is what it is: a Neil Gaiman book for children, one that pulls no punches Gaiman didn't already pull, that doesn't hesitate to shine the flashlight on the icky corners of a rather unpleasant room. Kudos, Mr. Gaiman, on your success; may other writers, but no imitators, follow in your wake.

A Recommendation

I told you I'd write more often if not as voluminously, and here you are--the vague sense that sometimes I deliver on my promises.

That said, I have a book recommendation to make. It puts me behind the times, certainly, but Amazon.com just recommended a book to me that I read three years ago, so I'm not the only one.

It is possible that some of you here may have heard of Neil Gaiman. Of that subset, some of you may have heard of The Sandman, widely considered Gaiman's opus. What you may not have heard of is a short story collection called The Sandman Book of Dreams.

I don't generally go for spin-off short story collections; my tastes there range either to authors I already know and love for their longer works, or what I can only term "high concept" collections whose themes are, shall we say, slightly eclectic. But this past week I found that linguistic history, while interesting, was making my brain bleed, and that I needed something wonderful to read, something that inspired me to play more freely with prose, lest I miss a call for submissions that I've been trying to address for most of the month. But I was broke, and so I hunted through the books I had, wondering what I could read, or re-read; and I found this, and thought "Huh. Well, I liked The Sandman; maybe it's time to abandon the snobbishness and see if a spin-off collection can work".

It can.

The book is old by most modern standards--the edition I have was printed in 1996. It has one or two authors in it you may have heard of: say, Gene Wolfe. Or John M. Ford. Or Susanna Clarke*. And like any collection of this nature it has its weak moments (or at least, I think so, but it's been a decade since I liked anything written by Nanci A. Collins). However, it also has its strong moments, and they are strong not just for spin-offs, not just for short stories, but for literature. There are stories in here that I would not hesitate to say were pure magic.

Gene Wolfe's "Ain't You Most Done?" is hallucinatory and transcendent. Tad Williams' "The Writer's Child" is one of the only stories about child abuse that I've read that has not been trite--and it's got a couple wonderful bits of literary trivia in it, to boot. Will Shetterly takes us back to one of the more awful and blackly humorous Sandman moments from the The Doll's House era. And then, there's Delia Sherman.

I had never heard of Delia Sherman before this collection. Turns out she's been around for a while and I'd just managed to avoid colliding with her prose. Her contribution is entitled "The Witch's Heart", and when it started I was ready for this to be the first real, true weak link, ignoring that I'd thought the same thing previously in the collection. What I got, after I took a deep breath and started her story over with a fresh mind, was one of the more astounding moments in my career as a reader.

I pride myself on being difficult to shock. I read Chuck Palahniuk's "Guts" while I was eating lunch one day. I made it through most of a Saw movie with a disdainful smirk, barring a now-passed phobia of needles. I could paint more examples but I'm afraid they'll make me sound like some sort of ghoul; the truth is, violence in media doesn't bother me. If anything it prevents me from being bothered. But there is a passage in "The Witch's Heart" that had me crawling up against the window next to my train seat, filled with sympathetic pain and sorrow for the main character. I had to put a hand over my mouth so I didn't shout out "No!". Well done, Ms. Sherman.

"The Witch's Heart" is near the middle of the collection. I have to assure you: it only gets better from there.

If you're here, you've probably read my writing, and I dare to think you might have enjoyed it. So here's my suggestion: Go out. Read this collection. You'll see reflected here the land I've been trying to write my way into for a very, very long time.

*Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, in case you weren't sure.

Review: Hellboy II: the Golden Army

I know, I know, I just wrote one of these not two days ago; that one had robots, this one (sort of) had robots, why won't it end?

The truth is, I wasn't really going to write a review of this one, not this week, anyway; I try not to fall back on writing reviews as a way to exercise my pen, and this month is a constant rain of sledgehammer blows to my pocketbook as far as the cinema is concerned--between having to delay my viewing of Wall•E and the release of Hellboy II, the X-Files movie, and of course The Dark Knight. However, I really think this one deserved a review--on some strange level I feel like I owe Guillermo del Toro that much, because the truth is, I think he's an amazing director, but I'm not sure I really liked this offering.

My review, spoiler-free, in 100 words or less: Middling good, but that's an average. It was visually stunning, and Mignola and del Toro's respective visions of the occult world hiding beneath our own blend into a wonderful cinematic soup. It captured the flavor and essence of the Hellboy universe and Hellboy's character, and it asked questions about magic, morality, and belonging that I found very resonant. However, its pacing was uneven, and many of the twists and turns in the plot were abrupt in a wrenching, armrest-clutching sort of way.

Now, it's time to bring up the



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The central questions of this movie are easy to pick out, as they are embodied in the primary antagonist--who also, helpfully, asks them of Hellboy right at the end of the film. Simply put, it's a story about choices: personal desires or the greater good, on the one hand; and the world of magic and the world you know, on the other. Hellboy II poses these questions elegantly, and sometimes painfully, but it is, unfortunately, not very good at answering them.

Now, let me say the things that were wonderful about this movie. The story was excellent as a backdrop for the sorts of problems and questions it poses, though I did not like the flensing del Toro gave to Celtic mythology, given Mignola's general policy of adherence to at least the corret names (Balor was the one-eyed king of the Fomorians--if you were going to make him Nuada's father, you could have at least acknowledged it was we lowly humans who got the names wrong!). Ron Perlman was, as always, a stellar actor, bringing complex life to what could easily be a cardboard role, and I also have to give major points to Luke Goss and Anna Walton as Nuada and Nuala--Nuada was a superb villain, and Nuala had a certain quiet grace, though she was not given much screen time with which to advertise it.

And again, the visuals were stunning; del Toro's cinematography is top-notch, and he brought in all the things about Pan's Labyrinth that should have been in a Hellboy movie (I speak here as a rabid fan of Mr. Mignola). The fight scenes were some of the most fantastic things I have ever seen, and he brought an original vision to his Troll Market that both evoked what the words "fairy market" or "Goblin Market" bring to mind for me, and also put a whole new, alien, disturbing face on them. During the final battle with the Golden Army, I thought to myself that this was the movie del Toro was born to make (I'm sort of hoping At the Mountains of Madness proves me wrong).

Now, that said, the bad things. Let me open up with the words "Tom Manning". In the first film, Tom Manning was a great foil for Hellboy and Professor Broom, providing a harsher father-figure and enforcer of rules for Hellboy, someone who serves to magnify both Hellboy's flaws and virtues. He was comical at times, but he provided something like serious narrative weight. In this film, Manning is a comic husk of the character he was; he stutters, he stammers, he's totally unable to enforce any kind of punishment. And to add insult to injury, during the discussion of how to deal with the problem of Nuada and the mortal wound he's dealt Hellboy, he responds to Liz Sherman's reminder about Hellboy saving his life with a simple, blunt "I know". Nothing dramatic; nothing major; no hint of the fact that he and Hellboy seemed to have come to something like an understanding at the end of the last film. It happens, and the plot moves on, and that's it.

In fact, this last statement could be used to sum up my primary issue with the entire movie: major, character-affecting decisions are made, and they don't affect anybody, least of all the characters making them. Hellboy sees that people are afraid of him and find him repulsive, and he sits in his room and wonders what he's fighting for; but the next time he fights, it is without hesitation. Johann Krauss insists things be done by the book, and is willing to let Hellboy die because those are his orders--until suddenly he's rebellious without precedent. Liz is asked to choose between Hellboy's life and the possibility he will end the world, and there is no hesitation in her answer, not even a dramatic musical chord. This could be forgiven if it was a mindless smash-fest with some pretty occult dressing on it, but the movie is clearly trying to be a bit deeper (see the scene with the elemental for a hammer-between-the-eyes example), and it could have succeeded if it had only taken the time to let these questions and conflicts play out on screen.

There's that key word: time. The movie doesn't have enough of it. By the end of the second act, such as it is, the film has asked enough questions to keep it going through an entire two more hours: there's Abe's emotionally-stunted romance with Nuala, and the possibility that Hellboy is wasting his time fighting for humans when he could be fighting for the side of magic, and the mentor/rival relationship between Hellboy and Johann Krauss, and on and on. All of this is sewn up with sudden personality swerves and not one, but two, dei ex machina (the creature in the underground city, and Krauss's mysterious wedding rings that he never had in any scene before that); it feels as though del Toro wasn't given a time limit until partway through the project, and realized he had painted himself into a narrative corner. Whatever the driving reason behind it, none of these issues is given very much time on the screen, and the result is a lack of grace and a sensation of the film being unfinished.

Take the battle with Mister Wink--I could have a field day with the symbolism here. Hellboy fights another hulking brute with odd-colored skin and an artificial hand; at the turning point of the fight he shatters his opponent's hand, and then is given an opportunity to save that opponent's life. He chooses not to, and the way that Mister Wink dies, I would argue, is more brutal and cold than any other death in this Hellboy film or the previous one. This could be a major moment; this could have been a moment like the one that the elemental fight succeeded at being. Instead, it's just a fight scene, and the movie it's contained within is just a movie.

I wish this weren't the case, because the central choice Hellboy has to make this time around--save the humans he's been defending all these years, or preserve the magical and the bizarre in the world--is a choice that really resonates with me, as a nerd and a fantasist. The battle with the elemental was as tragic and brutal as del Toro meant it to be--I hold that as one of his major successes. Nuada's final lines hurt me to listen to, especially his decision that he absolutely had to keep going, even though it meant he would be killed. And the decision of the main B.P.R.D. team (even, bizarrely, Johann Krauss) at the end of the film was one that I cheered for inwardly, but only because I understood the target del Toro was aiming for, not the one he actually struck.



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In short, Hellboy II: the Golden Army is a beautiful movie with a few wonderful narrative moments, and it asks a terrifying question that has, unfortunately, been asked many times before. I heartily recommend it, especially to Hellboy fans, but I do have to say that I think you can wait for DVD. And for God's sake, be prepared to discuss the movie afterward--it's not action-packed enough to turn your brain off, and I think it's the only way you'll feel it did your brain justice.

Review: WALL•E

I'm well aware I'm a bit late on this one; I am but one man with but one paycheck, and have a tendency to fail to see a movie on my own until everyone around me has already seen it. Blah blah, cultural void, blah blah hubris, blah blah spoilers to follow, please feel free to read me or ignore me as you see fit.

It's no secret that I'm kind of an enormous softie. It's not something I really feel the need to change; if I was worried about my masculinity I'd be writing Tom Clancy novels. That said, I want the world, or at least my small segment of it, to institute a new warning for movies: "Do Not See This Film Alone". Subdivision by reason for bringing someone along is perfectly acceptable, in this case I would put it into the category of "Will cause excessive sniffling back of tears".

Now then, WALL•E in less than 100 words: I loved it, and I think that calling it a movie about the environment is an extreme injustice, though that message hit hard enough that I caught myself picking up abandoned recyclables on my walk home. Nor do I think is just a movie about adorable robots. More fascinating to me was the all-too-probable future where machines are smarter than we are, the amazing non-verbal storytelling skills employed by Andrew Stanton and Pixar, and the message about continuing to strive for success no matter how hard it is, and what fascinating things can happen when you let your life get knocked off-course.




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Let me first say that this movie was a masterwork of storytelling. I suffer from excessive detachment from most media--I love a good story but it doesn't take too much for me to start wandering off to think about what I want to make for dinner that night. Usually symbolism hits me hard between the eyeballs and I just wind up being pissed off at the ham-fisted narrative, rather than engaged. At the end of WALL•E, though, it was all I could do to not beg out loud for everything to be alright. From the first ten minutes onward I was enthralled, and I never once stopped to reflect that it took a good half the movie for me to hear more than about twenty seconds of human voices. Even after the humans showed up, the most powerful moments in the movie were achieved through purely visual means--the Captain's determination and heroism are entirely displayed through extended shots of his feet, and a meaningful glance in the direction of a globe.

Further, the visuals are stunning. I found myself several times trying to figure out if a scene was computer-animated or actually filmed; and while Iron Man taught me to wait through the credit sequence in case something sublime occurs afterward, WALL•E had the first credit sequence in quite some time that I have simply sat back and enjoyed. The slowly-evolving visual storytelling of the recolonization and re-greening of Earth showed a real storytelling genius at work, and it echoed the reliance on visuals that made the rest of the film so strong.

Now, because I'm a nerd, I have to unpack the rest of this movie. Because I don't think it's just about the environment--that was a topical hat to cap off a much more complicated narrative outfit, which is the simple truth that all the best things in life are bought with the willingness to be brave and try something a little new and a little scary, and that quirks and flaws and little obsessions are the things about a person that we appreciate most. It is a condemnation of becoming too addicted to routine.

Look at the state of affairs throughout the movie. Wall•E is the last vestige of an attempt to clean up our planet after we've allowed it to become overpolluted, a plan which, we learn late in the film, was abandoned when the Wall•E robots started to cease functioning. Humanity, as represented by the CEO of BuyNLarge (a company whose name I could unpack the meaning of for hours), simply gives up at this point, and tells the autopilots of the starliners to "stay the course". Humanity's fate is placed entirely in the hands of machines--machines who, though they are characterized as villains, are simply carrying out their programming, in some cases living out existences which consist wholly of endless repetition. Humanity remains blissful and oblivious, and they fail to learn--as the trash compactor scene shows, all they've done is upgrade to the bigger, more impersonal Wall•A robots, and start ejecting their garbage into the space instead of into the dirt.

But then there's Wall•E. He's still obeying his programming, certainly, compacting trash into cubes; but he's doing it while listening to the soundtrack to Hello, Dolly! and collecting little curiosities that he thinks are visually exciting. Unlike the other robots of his type, he's managed to keep himself in working order by continuing to replace his parts rather than giving up (a move which, when it is mimicked by EVE at the end of the film, will save his life). His colorful and amusing existence stands in glaring contrast to the bright, white, clean, and totally mechanized existence onboard the Axiom. It's a symbolic bludgeon that his friend and apparently lifelong companion is a cockroach that is tough on a level approaching Herculean, whom he rewards with shelter from the dust-storms and the occasional Twinkie--they're both proof that good things come through working at it, not just staying the course.

In due course, WALL•E makes his way onto the Axiom, and creates havoc; but those little jolts to routine are precisely what the Axiom's population needs to actually experience life. The characters of John and Mary are one of the more obvious examples, but really, every triumph any protagonist has is in some way inspired by WALL•E's willingness to go a little outside the norm. The primary conflict of the film is inspired by WALL•E taking a break from his mindless routine to rescue a plant; every solution to every conflict in the film is involves doing something strange and unexpected with one's self or surroundings (the Captain's final battle with AUTO is a smorgasbord of creative thinking besting rote dedication); the happiest moments occur in wholly unorthodox situations (it's no coincidence that John and Mary's scene in the pool requires rebelling against robotic authority, and visually resembles two huge babies discovering the joy of water for the first time); and in the end, it is mimicking WALL•E's quirks and ingenuity that allows EVE to save his life.

I have to admit that the life the humans wind up living must be incredibly tough (and I can't help but imagine that the first generation or three of recolonizers is going to have a hellish time of it). But I think that, hard as it will be, the looks of pleasure on the quasi-mythological drawings in the credit sequence sum up the reward to be gained through hardship. As the captain puts it, "I don't want to survive. I want to live!" WALL•E isn't just a movie about the environment, or just a movie about adorable robots--WALL•E is a movie about the great things that one can do, if one is willing to step off the beaten path and endure the possibility, even just for a second, of being a freak. The look on MO's face when he slips off the preordained track to pursue WALL•E says it all--there is satisfaction, real success, and joy to be had in stepping out of your normal bounds.



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Review: The Incredible Hulk

Let's open this review with a trivia question: In the course of the movie, there are two major Hulk characters and a character with his own comic book who are hinted at but not explicitly named as such. Who are they? (One of them is introduced in their pre-superhuman form, so you'll need to guess the Super-Sekrit codename to get the win.)

My experience of The Incredible Hulk, in under 100 words: It was a thoroughly enjoyable film, with Edward Norton and William Hurt's performances standing out among the somewhat tepid work from the others, but with the fight scenes and special effects standing heads and shoulders above any other good thing about the movie, except for how wonderfully geeky their scriptwriters are. Definitely moremore eye-candy than brain-candy, but still with the thoughtfulness that is the hallmark of good Incredible Hulk stories.

That said, if you want my spoilerific deeper thoughts, you'll have to delve into the next paragraph, which begins a document that is FULL OF SPOILERS! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

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My comic-book geekdom is more or less a side effect of my mother's boss's comic-book geekdom. I never had a series I followed religiously until I was older and too caught up in my twenty-something college elitism to read anything but Vertigo titles--all my comic books in high school were last month's issues, given to the family by my mother's boss so I could enjoy them, which meant I generally had a day or two of reading a dozen comics and then had to hope the generous giver of comics was still following that series the next month. And yet, somehow, I understand the Marvel Universe deeply and completely. Call it cultural osmosis. Or perhaps just call it Wikipedia. Whatever it is, I love Marvel's universe much more than DC's, and I'm so grateful to see it getting such great treatment on the silver screen.

And among the various Marvel characters, I've always found the Hulk has one of the most enthralling, because while he is superhuman he is only rarely a superhero. At root, the Hulk is just a creature, a force of nature, even, separate from any morality except that which is imposed on him by external forces--when he's heroic it's usually because Bruce Banner aimed himself at something evil before the transformation, or because whatever was evil that week coincidentally got in his way. I won't get into analyzing the psychological side of the Hulk, as plenty of paper has already been sacrificed to that subject; I will, though, say that the film did a fantastic job of portraying this side of the Hulk.

Really, the best thing about Marvel movies is that they know their audience. All of their movies have been full of comic-fan in-jokes, but the amount of Hulk trivia tossed into The Incredible Hulk is amazing. We have our now-standard and still-awesome Stan Lee cameo (though Iron Man still has the best one to date), we have references to two major Hulk antagonists and a very covert reference to another superhero who, I believe, will be getting his own movie sooner than later, all of which came out without ever feeling like they interrupted the narrative to do an apostrophe to the nerds. And we have a "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry" joke, and Lou Ferrigno coming back to voice the Hulk (that's right, that "Hulk Smash!" was original, grade-A Smash) and even giving us a little pizza-loving cameo.

But even separate from my enormous nerdiness, there is plenty to love about The Incredible Hulk. I was at first put off by them deciding to skip the origin story in favor of beginning in media res, but as the movie continued, the quick flashes of the Hulk's origins they did during the credits grew on me more and more. I like that they focused on the fugitive angle, and brought the audience in to Bruce's angst after it had mellowed and matured.

I have to give major kudos to Edward Norton for his portrayal of Banner--I can give no higher compliment than to say that I sometimes forgot who was playing the character. I really felt for Bruce over the course of the movie, but never in that awful, too-clean way that seems to always infect superhero films. Scenes like the almost-sex between Bruce and Betty highlight the fear and stress and misery that is life as the Hulk, without dragging the film into bathos. I have to congratulate William Hurt, also, for his portrayal of Thunderbolt Ross, though I do have to jump in here and say that his character is where the script breaks down a little for me (more on that in a minute).

Of course, I have to talk about the fight scenes, which are excellent. The Hulk is, as he should be, a force of nature, but while he's brutish, he's got an animal cunning that belies the utterly brilliant scientist inside him. The final battle with the Abomination, in particular, was awesome, especially the outburst, necessary and spine-tingling, of a nice, old-school "HULK SMASH!"

Unfortunately, I now have to jump back to Thunderbolt Ross. He was far too dumbed down. I know, I know--why would I go to a superhero movie expecting an intelligent script? Because this wasn't just a superhero movie, this was a Hulk movie, damn it! Give me some brains in amongst the brawn. And they did--except that they transformed Ross into an out-and-out villain. In the comics, Ross headed the project that created the Hulk, but he considered the Hulk a monster and was doing his best to arrest or destroy Banner, not bring him in to create more Hulks; he was a bad guy only in the sense that he kept shooting the Hulk with missiles. I felt like the angle presented in the comics was far more interesting: it made Ross a more morally gray character, rather than a mustachioed metaphor for the military-industrial complex.

And while I am talking about characterization, I have to talk about the Abomination. I love Tim Roth, and I have found him to be an amazing part of any movie he's been in. Except this one. Maybe it's that Emil Blonsky's motivations are really just a huge, steaming cup of blind testosterone, but it seemed like Roth wasn't even trying. And while the shot of Blonsky standing about three inches tall next to the towering slabs of first the Hulk and then Thunderbolt Ross may have been meant to give us some insight into his thirst for strength, it really just came off as comically ham-fisted.

(I'm not even going to get into Liv Tyler--she did a great "the world hurts me" face, and her ability to plaintively say "Bruce?" was strong, but for the most part I'm not impressed by her as an actress.)

Ross and Blonsky (and Roth, though not Hurt) are really the weak points of the movie, and the fact that their motivations are the underpinnings of the plot makes the whole thing feel sort of overly simplistic, plot-wise. Fortunately, Norton's and Hurt's acting skills, some really inventive fight scenes, and the constant low-grade thrill of watching Banner try to evade Ross and his goons help to redeem the movie.

And then... [[WARNING! WARNING! DOUBLE-PLUS SPOILER AHEAD!]]

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And then...there's the end of the movie. There's Thunderbolt Ross, and he's drunk (and William Hurt is playing a hilariously gruff and miserable drunk in this scene, let me say), and he's sad, and then the door opens and there's a silhouette and the whole surface of my skin tingles because Tony Stark just walked into the bar! (I cannot give this the emphasis I want, lest I attract bypassing eyes to this spoiler.)

I love this last scene more than I reasonably should. It made the Marvel film universe feel interconnected in exactly the way the comic books were, and that was a level of cool I did not think it was possible for these movies to hit. And beyond that, it reminded me that pretty soon this is coming out, and while I don't love the Avengers that much I am going to be all over that movie like William Burroughs on a key of heroin.



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In short--this movie was excellent, and a comic book fan will love it on a whole different level. I felt like the Hulk was finally done cinematic justice. Now, don't forget your Hulk trivia--answers go up tomorrow.