… or whatever the Swedish use for “The horror, the horror”.

I missed Let the Right One In at the cinema, but I made sure to catch up with this well-received Swedish horror movie (that old chestnut!) as soon as possible. And I’m glad I did. It’s one of the most poignant, disturbing films I’ve seen in a long time.

In many ways Let the Right One In felt familiar: the look of the film – the faces, the clothes, the haircuts – was that of an urban Astrid Lindgren without the nostalgia. Critics with a thing for Freudian theory could probably have a field day talking about heimlich and the uncanny and the like; for the purpose of this blog, suffice it to say that Tomas Alfredson’s movie uses the familiarity and banality of the setting to great effect.

And it’s always great to see a film where the main characters are kids that are both well written and well acted, something that only a handful of directors can do. (Danny Boyle comes to mind.) The two protagonists, Oscar and Eli, are two of the most credible children I’ve seen in a movie, which is saying something considering that one of them is a vampire. Let the Right One In especially gets one thing right: its young protagonists are not idealised. Oscar’s reaction to being bullied viciously is a set of violent revenge fantasies not at all uncommon to boys of his age; I know that at times I was one good bullying away from going all Travis Bickle on some of the kids at my elementary school. Eli, the trickier character of the two because there’s no real template (there aren’t too many eleven-year-old-but-they’ve-been-eleven-for-a-long-time vampire girls-who-might-actually-be-castrated-boys that could have acted as consultants for this film), but the writing, the direction and the acting make her work. She’s both utterly believable as a girl (and it’s clear why someone like Eli would fall for her, possibly his first real love) and immensely unsettling as a vampire.

What I appreciate most about the film is how bravely it maintains its ambiguity. The relationship between Oscar and Eli is touching, and the feelings between them seem genuine, but there are enough hints suggesting that the old man Hakan that Eli travels with was once an Oscar. How much of Eli’s actions is actual love, and how much is her manipulating the boy into becoming what she needs him to become? In fact, with her forever stuck at eleven, how much of their continued fate together is inevitable, as long as they stay together? There are hints of Interview with a Vampire‘s Claudia in this thematic strand, but Let the Right One In arguably does something deeper, more poignant with it.

While we’re on the subject of horror: after League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910, I decided to give in to my Alan Moore cravings and got myself the first three volumes of his run of Swamp Thing. It’s fascinating to read these, because you can pick out themes and motifs that Moore later used, usually to better effect. At the same time, while Moore’s Swamp Thing (both the comic and the character) are complex, with richly metaphysical overtones, I have similar problems with it as I have with much of the first volume of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Both take the old staple of the horror comic and infuse it with mythology, deeper characterisation than you’d expect from the genre, and a degree of relevance, moving away from pure escapism, but they’re still both caught in the confines of the genre. The end result, at least for me, is a comic that tries to be more than just horror but just about not succeeding.

Still, it’s bound to be better than Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing movie. When all a film has going for it is Adrienne Barbeau’s breasts, well, then…

Before Sunrise seems to be one of those films that ‘people of my generation’ (the moment you use that phrase unironically, you’re getting old, man!) tend to like. Somehow many of them seem to feel that it captures their attitude towards romance and what they wish their EuroRail adventures had been.

Some films should be seen for the first time at a certain age. If you don’t see them when you’re ten or sixteen or twenty-two, you’ve forever missed your chance, and unlike your peers you won’t be able to watch them with a healthy dollop of nostalgia that makes them bearable to begin with. The Goonies is probably one of those films, with its ’80s cod-Spielbergian cast of kids. Having seen Before Sunrise for the first time less than a week before I turn 34 makes me think that this is another one of those films.

It’s quite obvious that the movie itself is enamoured with its leads and their conversations – because that’s all there is. My thoughts, for most of the film’s running time, were, “Yes, I remember those kind of conversations, when I was an undergrad student, at 2am after lots of red wine.” In that situation, those wannabe deep talks are enough – but now? I sat there thinking, “Oh, grow up!” and making fun of the characters’ self-infatuation. Which worked for about ten, fifteen minutes… and then it got boring.

You can capture the feel of a certain age or a certain type of situation. You can do so with lots of affection. But the moment you give up on any semblance of critical distance, you’re likely to end up with something narcissistic – something you can only love if you identify 100%. But especially Julie Delpy’s Céline is way too serious about her ramblings, giving the impression of a second-year Philosophy student (with a minor in Gender Studies) thinking that she’s discovered The Meaning of Life. Personally I found Ethan Hawke’s Jesse somewhat more bearable, because I thought that he doesn’t have this po-faced seriousness, whereas my girlfriend found him way more annoying. Read into that what thou wilt.

On a somewhat more positive note: I received Alan Moore’s new comic this week, the cumbersomely titled League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume III: Century: 1910 (if we want to be exact, we’d have to add the intriguing, Brecht-inspired subtitle, “What Keeps Mankind Alive”). It’s very clearly the first part only of a longer story (parts 2 and 3 are to follow in 2010 and 2011, alas), but differently from Moore’s Black Dossier, he’s actually telling a story in this one. And he’s up to his usual clever intertextual games, his major inspiration for this one being Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.

And yes, Moore and O’Neill still like a good bit of nudity, although there’s less of the actual sex. Regardless of whether you like that sort of thing or not, Kevin O’Neill’s compositions are gorgeous:

And to finish on a slightly less voyeuristic note – checking out the Threepenny Opera before reading Century: 1910 seems to be a requirement:

The short version: I liked Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. It was by no means perfect and there are a couple of pretty bad flaws – mostly to do with the film’s interpretation of Adrian Veidt and the massive cuts in Laurie/Silk Spectre II’s backstory (to the point where there is almost nothing left of the crystalline glory of chapter IX, “The Darkness of Mere Being”) – but it’s the first film version of an Alan Moore comic that takes the source material seriously, even if it doesn’t always completely trust its audience.

One problem that Snyder seems to have, though, is that he’s too much in love with his talents and his cleverness. The use of music was one aspect of this, with too many jokes being used in a winking “Get it? We’re being clever as well as showing reverence to Moore’s original!” And whenever there was something semi-clever, Snyder had the tendency to linger on it for much too long, making these moments smug rather than witty and subtle. The cheesy soft porn scene on Archie? Prime example of that sort of smugness. Moore wasn’t above the occasional broad joke in the original, but they didn’t last for five minutes.

The other thing is Snyder’s propensity for over-the-top violence. Some fit okay, even though I didn’t particularly feel I needed to see a man’s arms being sawn off (not that the original scene with its throat-cutting was that much more harmless – I’ve got a thing about throat-slicing scenes…), but the first fight scene with Dan and Laurie didn’t make any sense story-wise. These two haven’t been wearing their costumes for years, they haven’t been out to beat up street ganes in a long, long time. Their first fight should be clumsy and exhilarating, not choreographed to a T.

My problems with the ending? No, they have nothing to do with Snyder’s re-interpreting the squid into S.Q.U.I.D. I agree that audiences wouldn’t have bought the comic’s finale – hell, I’m not sure I fully bought it, at least not the means by which Adrian executes his plans. What didn’t work was how clean everything was: in the original we’re treated to page after page of the apocalyptic, horrific results of Veidt’s plan. There’s nothing clean about it. Similarly, in the film Ozymandias more or less receives absolution from Dr. Manhattan – and in an utterly inexplicable move, the “Nothing ever ends” line that is so essential to the ending and to Adrian’s character ark is spoken, after her return from Antarctica, by Laurie in a conversation with Dan. As a wise man once said: Huh?!

Final quibble: why, oh why, did they feel the need to change the beautiful simplicity of “I did it 35 minutes ago”?

But still, as I said: I liked it… unlike a certain mustachioed madman.