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Sugar, ah, honey honey

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Hard Candy is one of the most uncomfortable films I’ve seen lately. Is it a good film? I don’t know. It’s an interesting film, and it’s definitely well acted. It’s a courageous film for the most part because it doesn’t go for an easy judgment of its characters, but neither does it go for an equally easy moral relativism. And then, in the last twenty minutes or so, it commits a couple of serious blunders that take away from its ability to disturb.

Like some of the most disappointing films, its first quarter of an hour is probably the strongest part of the film. The way it establishes the relationship between its two main characters – photographer Jeff and precocious 14-year old Hayley – and then turns this relationship upside down is very well done. Jeff isn’t an out-and-out creep, yet he is way too keen to play along with the teenage girl’s flirtation. He deserves it when she turns the tables on him… at first, but does he deserve the emotional and physical torture she puts him through? How far does his guilt go, and what puts her in a place where she can take it upon herself to be judge, jury and quite possibly executioner?

Hard Candy

Jeff is too much interested in teenage girls, and he lets his interest go too far. He is guilty – but so far his desires are only different in degree from those who check out porn that advertises itself with “Hot Teen Sluts” or “Barely Legal”. You don’t have to go to the pornographic industry to see how teenage female sexuality is used to sell, well, just about anything, and how the line that delineates legal desires from illegal ones is blurred. Does this lessen Jeff’s guilt? No, but it puts it in context, and it makes it less easy to draw a line between him and they guy you work with who has the hots for the Olsen Twins or early Britney Spears or any number of nymph used by the marketing industry. If Jeff deserves castration, what do guys deserve who count down the days until some teen starlet becomes legal, or who fantasise about the high school cheerleader dressed up to be a sexual fantasy?

All of this only works so far, though. Throughout Hard Candy the question of a teenage girl who’s disappeared comes up, and Hayley insinuates that Jeff was somehow involved in this disappearance. A (chaste) photo of the vanished girl serves as incriminating evidence. Unfortunately the film comes out at the end and says that Jeff was either there when the girl was killed (by another pedophile) or that he killed her himself. Does it matter which of the two is true? Not really. He is culpable in either case, and his culpability is different in kind from the many, many men who have a hard-on for teenage girls. At this point we can easily draw the line, and Jeff is on the other side of the line. He’s a murderer or an accessory to murder. And at that point it becomes much easier to watch Hayley drive him to commit suicide. Most of the ambiguity of the film falls away, and with it the discomfort. And the movie’s previous courage to let its ambiguity stand gives way to a much more conventional moral simplicity, leaving us with just the window dressing of ambiguity.

I like strong women

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Just when my frustration at Firefly‘s premature cancellation was starting to abate:

Yesterday evening we watched the last episode of Veronica Mars. The series definitely went out on a very strong episode – but why did it have to go out to begin with? Okay, the answer is simple: not enough people were watching it. Don’t ask me what they were watching instead; probably some reality TV crap with barely one percent of the wit of Veronica Mars, not to mention the wonderful acting by the lead and the great supporting characters. I’ve said it before (somewhere) and I’ll say it again: the relationship between Veronica and Keith Mars is the best father-daughter relationship I’ve ever seen on TV.

Yes, there were weaker episodes, one of the banes of series that require 20+ episodes per season. Yes, season 2 was a muddled mess in terms of its overarching plot. And yes, Duncan Kane was largely a boring waste of space. But the main character was one of the funniest, strongest female characters this side of Joss Whedon’s work. And I don’t see anyone much having replaced her.

Veronica & Co.

Talking of strong women: one of the games I’ve been playing lately, Mirror’s Edge, is one of the few A-list titles whose protagonist Faith is a woman – and, more unusually, the game is played from first-person perspective, so the mostly male players aren’t even invited to ogle Faith’s assets. (No Lara Croft, her.) The game takes the trendy sport Parkour as its main inspiration, but it’s much more than a gimmick – in fact, it’s perhaps the most exhilarating first-person game I’ve played. Mirror’s Edge is flawed, mainly in its humdrum plot and storytelling, but when it works, it works amazingly well. I’ll let the visuals speak for the game:

Geek gratification… oh, and braaaaains!

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Geek affectation is annoying as hell. It’s as annoying as the person at a party who thinks that quoting Monty Python for hours, doing the voices and accents and all, counts as conversation. It’s as annoying as mistaking nostalgia for actual quality, and going on about how The Goonies deserves a sequel. It’s getting all hot and bothered about something because it’s got pirates or ninjas in it.

Or zombies. The shuffling undead are one of the hallmarks of geek affectation, as if there was something inherently fantastic about something just because it featured some walking corpses moaning forlornly for brains.

And yet, the latest book I’m reading is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. And I’m enjoying it a lot more than what I read before (some book by Bill Bryson about some English writer – hey, it was a present!). Thing is, World War Z is a much better read than it ought to be. It sounds like a cheap cash-in on one of the geek affectations du jour, even more so when you hear that it was written by Max Brooks, the same guy who wrote The Zombie Survival Guide (and, coincidentally, is Mel Brooks’ son).

WWZ takes an interesting approach: it’s written as a series of interviews with the survivors of the zombie apocalypse (hell of an apocalypse if there were survivors, if you ask me…). You’ve got a few dozen different characters telling their little part of the bigger picture: soldiers, politicians, scientists, civilians. There’s none of the expected “Will they make it?”, which means that Brooks can concentrate on effective vignettes and on providing a rich playground for our imagination.

For the largest part, the book’s vision of a world surviving, just barely, the rise and onslaught of the living dead is compelling because it is believable. There’s also the zombie genre’s staple smattering of social criticism. This is perhaps the book’s main weakness, though: when Brooks gets critical, he sometimes veers towards broad satire, at which point the narrating characters turn into stereotypes. And since the believability of the writing and its documentary style is its main asset, those sections break the fourth wall as Brooks winks at us, believing himself more witty than he is. Another, smaller weakness, is that there isn’t quite enough material for the 300+ pages – a shorter, leaner World War Z would have been a better World War Z. (That’s the big risk in catering to a specific audience (e.g. zombie geeks): veering into fan service.) Still, this is a zombie book that has bite and is surprisingly successful at gnawing into your cerebrum.

Digital poignancy – the lives of the homeless (now in Simlish!)

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Again, this isn’t a proper blog entry so much as a heads-up for one of the more interesting game-based blogs out there. Meet Kev, a homeless, deranged Sim, and his daughter Alice:

Down and out in Sim City

Alice and Kev is an experiment in digital storytelling, and it’s surprisingly poignant, in addition to being funny and absurd. And it’s probably the best advertising for The Sims 3, even if that isn’t its primary purpose. Electronic Arts should be paying the guy.

For comparison, here’s one of the official trailers:

Picture courtesy of Alice and Kev by Robin Burkinshaw.

Och fasa, och fasa…

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… 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…

Swamp Thing (duh duh, duh duh!), you make my heart sing!

You can’t always go back

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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.

Gosh, aren't we all, like, cute and stuff?

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:

league-of-extraordinary-gentlemen-century-4

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

Second chances: The Claim

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Michael Winterbottom’s an odd one for me. I appreciate his talent, and his films clearly don’t compare to anyone else’s – they’re always very clearly Michael Winterbottom films. I like that he doesn’t tell me how to feel about his characters and their actions. At the same time, though,  I sometimes end up not feeling anything much; I watch his films feeling remote and strangely indifferent. It’s as if I have to take a conscious decision to care about his characters.

I first watched The Claim, his loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, years ago. I didn’t dislike it, but the film felt cold and distancing – which wasn’t what I’d been expecting after reading Hardy’s novel. Winterbottom’s earlier film based on Hardy, Jude (wisely leaving out the Obscure part in its title), pretty much came across as an exact translation of one of English literature’s most depressing books into celluloid. (The very ending of the book was gone, but that only meant the film was depressing rather than suicidally depressing.) The original novel came through so strongly, I couldn’t see a director’s handwriting in the film, nor did I need to.

The Claim was perhaps the second or third film by the director that I’d seen, and to some extent it felt like I didn’t fully understand Winterbottom’s idiom. I only got the coldness that crept out of almost every single shot of the film, muting the emotions. Then, some years later, I saw the director’s Wonderland, and while it didn’t turn me into a Michael Winterbottom fan, it helped me see things in his approach and style that I hadn’t been able to see before.

Having rewatched The Claim, I’d say that the film has rewarded my renewed attention. The film is no longer Hardy’s Mayor, but it is a worthwhile take on the original, evoking its own flavour. The casting is pretty much pitch-perfect, especially with Peter Mullan, the go-to man for stubborn, self-destructive men who should know better but who eventually don’t have the strength to act on this knowledge. And the muted, remote style keep the story from becoming melodramatic; instead we’re invited to observe and eventually mourn from a distance. It’s pretty much the opposite of the easy emotions of a Spielberg or a Ron Howard – the film isn’t conventionally touching or moving, it gives you a choice and asks you to act on this choice: will you become involved, or will you remain cold and distant? Do you want to be touched by this? Because, if you do, you need to know that it may hurt. It may get close, closer than is comfortable. That is the proposition the film makes, like Wonderland, and that I’ve come to find not just puzzling but, in equal measures, beguiling.

And if those feet in ancient times

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There is much that is cheesy and dated about Chariots of Fire. The Oscar bait heavy inspirationalism. The frequent slo-mo sequences that suggest the film’s director, Hugh Hudson, was a sort of pacifist late 20th century Zack Snyder. More than anything else, that icon of ’80s cheese, the Vangelis soundtrack.

And yet, the film works. Even as I was watching it, thinking how its brand of male bonding would make Freudian critics and queer theorists giggle with glee, how it was manipulative and tear-jerky, I couldn’t escape the pull of its pathos and earnestness, nor its nationalist nostalgia. The latter is easiest to accept, perhaps, as the film’s idealisation of the Britain of Yore nevertheless permits a critical note or two: the anti-semitism of the Cambridge deans, the echoes of a recent war defying patriotic re-interpretation, or the way that one character’s beliefs trump the pride of the British empire even in the face of its future king.

The film even pulls off the Vangelis, although just about (and you have to be willing to accept it as a product of its time), because its synth strains add an intriguingly anachronistic note to the movie’s nostalgia for a better, nobler time – filtered, by now, through our own ambivalent, ironic nostalgia for the ’80s. The movie’s editing, too, helps with its Nicholas Roeg-like fragmenting touches, adding a touch of strangeness to what might otherwise be too reassuringly – and boringly – familiar.

Chariots of Fireworks as a one-off thing: if there was another film like it (and there very well might be – can’t say I’m too versed in sports movies), even if that film was equally well-made, it would feel like too much: too much pathos, too much British nostalgia, too much Inspiration with a Capital I. In itself, the film holds up. At least if you have a touch of yearning for that silly, gentle, noble Englishness that never really existed except in the minds of writers, poets and the people who made the Hovis bread ads.

P.S.: After my long hiatus from this blog, I’ve decided this: I’ll aim for one entry per week. No more, no less. It’d be cool if you stick around to find out together with me whether I’ll manage.

Sick squid? Not bloody likely!

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Squid we can believe in!

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.