Contrarian Days

I watched a couple of movies today that were, from what I gathered, generally well and truly hated. Maybe "not well liked at all" is a more precise description, but either way they both got stomped on, but good. And then I watch them, and I like them both. To varying degrees, and for various reasons, and with qualifications, some of them massive. But still: either I'm going soft, or you're all a bunch of stupid morons.

The shameful truth about The Box and me is that I kind of wanted to hate it. Even without yet having seen his previous film, the infamous Southland Tales, I've come to the decision that I really dislike Richard Kelly. He's said a lot of obnoxious things in interviews, about his "neo-Marxist" political views and his views on writing, and his response to the critical shellacking he received following Southland Tales essentially amounted to "If you don't like my movie, then you're old." So the fact that I did end up admiring the film, to a point, I guess means that I'm positively busting with integrity, but I'm not even going to mention that, as it would be crass.

Based on Richard Matheson's famous short story "Button, Button", The Box tells the tale of Norma and Arthur Lewis (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden), and the offer made to them by Arlington Steward (Frank Langella). Steward gives the couple a box, inside of which is a red button, enclosed in glass. If the button is pushed in the next twenty-four hours, someone who the Lewises don't know will die, and they, the Lewises, will be given one million dollars. If they choose not to push the button, Steward will retrieve the button, and go on his way. Their dire financial situation having been established, Diaz pushes the button about a half hour in, and this, by the way, signals the end of Kelly's Matheson adaptation, and the hour and half that follows is pure Kelly.

For better or for worse. The better is that there is a great deal of strangeness that Kelly squeezes out of Matheson's premise, and his own extrapolation of it: mysterious kids, random nosebleeds, a city-wide rise in domestic violence, NASA, Mars, lightning...what do any of these things have to do with each other? The first hour of the films at times feels like the stage is being set for something truly bizarre and mysterious, and the second half pays it off, or tries to, although the core pay-off -- the meaning behind it all -- has been cribbed from any number of earlier SF films (most of which cribbed it from one very famous movie, the title of which shouldn't be revealed as it would constitute a spoiler), and The Box's strangeness goes from intriguing to a trifle desperate. When Kelly wrote the section of the film that ends with Marsden suspended above his wife, who is at home in bed, in a pool of floating water, which then comes splashing down, I imagine he must have thought: "What the fuck am I doing?" And then he looked at the calendar, and then the clock, and thought: "It'll work. It'll work. It'll work. It'll work." Over and over again until he nearly believed it himself.

The second half, in general, is just loony, not to mention clumsy. In fact, clumsiness doesn't always cut it. At one point, James Marsden leaves a party due to illness, and as he steps outside another character, played by Ryan Woodle, approaches him with a gun, and tells him to get into a car, which Marsden does. After Woodle's character has revealed his intentions, Kelly cuts to a scene of another character being kidnapped. Then he cuts back to Marsden and Woodle, and Woodle says "They just kidnapped [character we just saw being kidnapped]." Well, how the Christ does he know that? Shouldn't Woodle have approached Marsden after we saw that other person get kidnapped, so that we could have inferred that Woodle either witnessed or was informed of the kidnapping before he talked to Marsden? As it plays now, Woodle and Marsden were already on the road by that time, so he couldn't have known this. Yes, we will learn that Woodle's character would have had a very good reason to suspect that such a thing would happen, but that's not what he says. He says, essentially, "Hey, they just kidnapped so-and-so." Like, "I just heard it on the radio that..." or "I was just watching the dailies earlier, and..." or "Richard Kelly wanted me to tell you..."

The Box is many things. It's part of a superb SF/horror film. It's also a paranoid thriller, as well as a surreal, existentialist nightmare. And it's also the kind of movie that uses an image of the World Trade Center, because that's the kind neck-breaking strain boneheads like Kelly put themselves through in their shallow bid to claim significance for their work. But I'd be lying if I said that I didn't feel it was mostly those first three things. What The Box thinks it's up to, I have no clue, but when it's not being either very good or very bad, it's pleasantly baffling. And possibly, I've become too forgiving.

Gentlemen Broncos, meanwhile, was absolutely rent asunder by critics last year, and this disappointed me because, despite my aggressive indifference towards Hess's Napoleon Dynamite, the premise of this new film struck me as something I wished I'd thought of: a young man who aspires to write science fiction professionally, attends a writers' workshop/getaway, at which one of the instructors will be a successful SF author who is our young hero's idol. That idol will read what our hero has submitted, and then plagiarize it.

The capacity for a merciless skewering of SF, both professional and amateur, as well as fandom, in this premise is incalculable. But then the reviews started coming out, as well as clips from the film itself, and everyone who'd seen the film seemed to agree -- and I was beginning to see their point -- that the SF that was described in this film, and the SF film within the film, was so far removed from any reality, bore so little resemblence to the genre as we know it, from any era or any nationality, that there was no possibility for satiric sting, no potential for self-recognition for us SF fans looking to laugh at ourselves, or each other, or to get all the inside jokes we felt sure Hess would lay throughout his movie, because, of course, there were no inside jokes. Gentlemen Broncos existed entirely in the world of Hess's brain, so any inside jokes would be appreciated only by him.

So then I watched the film, and I realized that what everyone was bitching about was that Gentlemen Broncos was not the film they imagined it would be when they read the plot synopsis (I know this, because I imagined the same movie). The fact that Hess had no interest in satirizing, or even somewhat aproximating, actual science fiction, as we experience it in the real world (there's an irony there, I think) doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody. Or if it did, they didn't care, because they knew the movie they wanted to see, and this wasn't it.

Each of Jared Hess's films have been pitched at the same level of grotesque deadpan. The man is not a realist. I don't know if this was lost on the many fans of Napoleon Dynamite, but it's a style that has been falling out of favor with those fans ever since. The point is, none of his characters are meant to be believed, in the sense that we might expect to meet some version of them in our daily lives. But they are meant to be believed in the kind of world that might contain them all. Presumably, that world would also feature forms of entertainment; possibly, this would include some version of science fiction. If so, then the science fiction found in a world population by Napoleon Dynamite, Uncle Rico, Don Carlos, and Dr. Reginald Chevalier is going to look like this:

You'll notice I haven't spent any time trying to convince anyone that Gentlemen Broncos is a good (not great -- nobody ever said "great") and funny movie. I can't do that, so I won't even try; the film is too off for me to muster that kind of argument. All I'm saying is, if you watch it, let it be the movie it is, and don't worry about the movie you thought it was going to be.

Of course, if you don't think Jermaine Clement as Dr. Chevalier gives one of the great comic performences of the last several years, then I have nothing to say to you.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 30: Ann Has a Martian in Her Womb!

This is going to be a tough one. Look, every day of this project is a crapshoot, because I don't know if I'm going to like the story or stories that I read, and therefore don't know what my attitude will be when I sit down to write about them. And I don't especially mind if I hate the story, because that will certainly give me something to write about, at the very least. What kills me is when I'm indifferent to the story. In those cases, I hardly think I can get by with saying "This one was okay, you might like it, but I don't know." This problem is sometimes compounded by the fact that I don't know anything about the person who wrote it, though today that isn't an issue. What's really bugging me today is that the guy who wrote the story to which I'll be directing my apathy is Richard Matheson, and in choosing to write about him today, I really, really wanted to put him in a good light.

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I don't think this can reasonably be considered a "first thing's first" kind of statement, but I do want to start off by saying that Matheson's fiction has severely dropped off in quality over the last decade or two. More, possibly, because he actually doesn't publish much these days. But outside of a couple of really good Westerns he wrote in the 1990s (Journal of the Gun Years and The Gunfight) his later fiction has been sort of awful, with the nadir coming in 2002, in the form of a novel called Hunted Past Reason. This is a novel that combines Matheson's non-mainstream spiritual beliefs with an alarmingly graphic Deliverance-style suspense story. Though I don't share them, I'm not going to spend any time mocking Matheson's beliefs, but I must say that preaching about reincarnation doesn't mix well with male rape. Few things do, I suppose.

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I read Hunted Past Reason at a time when I was well past my early exposure to Matheson's work, and was coming to find much to dislike about his new stuff. But I loved that old stuff. Great short stories like "The Distributor" and "Born of Man and Woman", and truly classic novels like I Am Legend, plus his work as a screenwriter on Burn, Witch, Burn!, the films based on his work like The Incredible Shrinking Man and Duel...the guy's got a hell of a resume, and his reputation as one of the great genre writers of the 50s, 60s and 70s is entirely justified. As he got older, he just lost his feel for it. Big deal, it happens; it happened to Robert Bloch, also, and I'm not the kind of guy who believes that bad work late in a career tarnishes the good work done before. Still, books like Hunted Past Reason made me wonder if I'd grown out of Matheson, and that maybe if I went back to his old work I'd find that he was never that good, and that it was all hype. So I reread I Am Legend, and doing so completely shot the shit out of that theory. It's still a great book.

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All of which, finally, made me confident about today's reading, because I was gonna read something old. Because Matheson has written in so many genres, I figured the best book to use was a collection of old Matheson stories, put out by TOR several years ago, called Duel, and I picked a fairly long one called "Trespass". It's about a guy named David Collier who, as the story opens, has just returned home from South America after six months to find Ann, his wife, strangely withdrawn. He's been dreaming of this homecoming for a long time, and is shaken by its anticlimactic nature. Why is Ann so upset? Because she's pregnant. And she conceived within the last six months. David is understandably outraged, but Ann assures him that she did not cheat on him, and does not know how this could have happened. A skeptical David reminds her that he's a scientist, and that conception is impossible without intercourse (or at least sperm, but Ann's argument implies that this was also nowhere to be found).

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As the months pass by, David frantically tries to find an answer that will prove his wife correct -- he consults Kleinman, their doctor, and David's fellow scientist and friend John Meader -- but comes up empty. At the same time, Ann -- who is increasingly angry at David for refusing to believe her, let's face it, pretty messed up story -- begins behaving erratically. She eats incredible amounts of salt. She drinks gallons of water and coffee. She goes outside, into the cold Indiana winter, wearing very little and catches pneumonia. She begins reading every book on every subject she can get her hands on -- on physics, geography, history, chemistry, etc. -- books she never showed any interest in before. She begins chanting a strange singsong with lyrics such as "To walk on shores of orange sea, cool, to tread the crimson fields, cool, to raft on silent waters, cool..."

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And there's more. Her pneumonia is cured in seventeen minutes. X-rays show the fetus continues to change its size, apparently at will. It also has two hearts. So basically, it's a martian. Yeah, that's where this story's going, and you probably knew that, as I did, and you probably also, as I do, find nothing inherently wrong with that premise. In fact, the story threatens to have a surprisingly nasty ending, though it ultimately goes soft (while maintaining a kind of subjective bleakness in the heroes triumph). The problem is the story's overall flatness and repetition. Ann eats salt and drinks a lot of coffee and water, and she keeps doing that for pages. Page after page after page of that. Possibly this is Matheson's attempt to build up the strangeness of his situation so that the final revelation of what's going on, and the various characters' essentially rapid acceptance of the idea, will go down easier, but it doesn't quite work.

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The title of this post is the exact line of dialogue as delivered by John Meader when he tells David and Kleinman what he believes Ann's real problem is. He says: "Ann has a Martian in her womb!" I wonder how that line would have played for me had he said "alien" instead of "Martian" -- I still may have not been a fan of it, but I think I at least would have given it a pass. As it stands, all I could think was, "Why 'Martian'? How the hell do you know it's specifically from Mars? General 'alien', okay, but there's nothing about Ann's symptoms that scream 'Mars'." Of course, in the 1950s, when the story was written, "Martian" and "alien" were basically synonymous in popular culture, but the line still reads as plain goofy.

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I don't know. I don't know what else to say about this story, really. Despite my misgivings, it is fine. But this is Matheson, and I wanted to read something great by him, or at least very good, something I could point to and say, "See? When people say Matheson is great, this is what they're talking about." And he is great, or was, but my choice of story unfortunately does not bear that out.

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Read I Am Legend instead.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 16 - The Clams Aren't Safe

William Peter Blatty's Elsewhere sort of just appeared one day. This novella first appeared in Al Sarrantonio's great horror anthology, 999, which came out, appropriately enough, in 1999 (it's scheduled to be published as a stand-alone book this December). 999 is full of terrific, or at least interesting, short fiction, but Elsewhere is the centerpiece of that anthology. For one thing, at 100 pages, it's by far the longest piece in the book, but more importantly it marked Blatty's return to horror fiction; his previous novel in this genre, Legion, the sequel to The Exorcist, was published sixteen years prior.

What a lot of people don't realize these days is that Blatty began his career as a comedic novelist. Which Way to Mecca, Jack? and John Goldfarb, Please Come Home opened the door for him to write for the movies, and began a long partnership with Blake Edwards (in those days, Blatty's most famous credit was as co-writer of the first Inspector Clouseau film, A Shot in the Dark). So The Exorcist, his blockbuster novel from 1971, was really an anomaly. That novel grew from Blatty's Catholic faith, among other things, and forever changed the way he was perceived as a writer. Blatty never set out to be a horror writer, and I imagine he still doesn't think of himself that way, but since 1971 his work has been either a part of that genre, or a bizarre and twisted genre entirely its own, like the novel, and film, The Ninth Configuration.

The first time I heard about Elsewhere, it was being talked about as film, which Blatty would write for William Friedkin, the filmmaker behind The Exorcist, to direct. As a huge fan of Blatty's by that point (whenever it was, I can't really remember, but it was a long time ago), I was very excited by the idea that he was returning to horror. I have a vague recollection that, in the piece I read about this up-coming film, Blatty said that while he really didn't know much about horror, his experiences with The Exorcist had taught him how to manipulate the audience into being scared. He'd become familiar with the methods, tricks, that sort of thing. So okay, I said, let's see this movie. But the movie never happened. That magazine, or newspaper, reference I read was the first and last reference to it I ever encountered. Friedkin's career had sunk pretty low at the time, and I have to assume that had something to do with the scuttling of the project, but why any studio would turn their back on the opportunity to slap "From the Writer and the Director of 'The Exorcist'" on a poster is still beyond me.

Anyway, as I said, it never happened. Then, one day, I'm browsing in some bookstore somewhere, and I find this book 999. And among the many big name contributors (King, Oates, Gaiman, Ligotti) was William Peter Blatty, and his story, a 100 page novella, was called Elsewhere. Well, all right then, I said to myself, as I bought the book. And now, nearly ten years later, I've read it.

The set up to Elsewhere is pretty much the same as that of The Haunting of Hill House (or The House on Haunted Hill, for that matter). Joan Freeboard is a realtor (she's ocassionally referred to, bizarrely, as "the Realtor") who has been tasked with selling a secluded mansion on a small island in New York. The house is called Elsewhere, and it has a reputation for being haunted. One of its previous owners, a doctor named Peter Quandt, murdered his wife, then took his own life. Since then, subsequent residents have met with various bizarre fates, some lethal, some not. This has happened often enough that, for many years, the house has been uninhabited. Freeboard, who has been suffering from strange dreams involving an oddly familiar angel whose cryptic messages she doesn't understand, is determined to sell Elsewhere, and hits upon the idea of clearing its name. So she recruits her old friend Terrence Dare, a famous writer; a British psychic named Anna Trawley; and an esteemed expert in the supernatural named Gabriel Case. The four of them will stay in the house for a period of time and investigate -- since Freeboard doesn't believe in ghosts, she believes Trawley and Case will find nothing. Dare will write up their experiences as a magazine article. The renown attached to Dare, not to mention Case and Trawley, should end all the dark rumors and supersitions surrounding Elsewhere, Freeboard reasons, the house will be sold, and she'll make quite a bit of money.

But, of course, once they get to the house, odd things begin happening. Dare thinks he sees a priest scurrying through a door, in the dark. He also seems to have lost his beloved dogs, which he'd insisted on bringing with him. Or did he bring them? Everyone seems to be suffering from weird memory lapses. And Freeboard experiences a wicked case of deja vu. And why doesn't Gabriel Case look like his picture? Well, everything gets answered. And it's all just too damned pat.

As it happens, a few days ago, over at Cinema Styles, a discussion was brewing about the pros and cons of the ambiguity levels of the film version of The Exorcist. Those who felt that there should have been more ambiguity argued that the question of whether or not Regan was actually possessed should have remained unanswered until the end, and that Father Karras's struggle with his faith could have played out the same way, with no loss of emotional or visceral power. Those who argued against that point of view (and I was among them...okay, I was the only one) said that this would have simply been ambiguity for its own sake. If that unanswered question doesn't alter the outcome, then what's the point of leaving it unanswered? In art, ambiguity is a tool, or a shading, and should only be employed when it has a purpose. I can see no purpose for it in The Exorcist, when the the question is finally simply "yes" or "no". Not only that, but the question -- is Regan possessed? -- is only interesting if the answer is yes.

But in Elsewhere, the question isn't simply "yes" or "no". As with The Exorcist, the question of the supernatural in Elsewhere shouldn't be raised, because, for this story to work, the answer must be "yes". Yet the question that shouldn't be answered so cleanly, but which Blatty goes ahead and answers, is "why". I can't think of a haunted house story that has ever benifited from a neat wrap-up. The model for Blatty's novella, as I've already said, is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Now I realize there are many people who argue about the presence of the supernatural in that novel, too, but the point is that even if you're convinced, as I am, that Jackson's ghosts are real, by the end of the novel you still don't know exactly what has happened, and the sense of dread and unease is, as a result, heightened.

The story is also not served well by its short length. I rarely argue that a work of fiction needs to be longer than it is, but this is a case where another fifty pages or more would have been a help. When Blatty reaches his explanation, he rushes through the characters' reactions, so the last few pages essentially read like this:

CHARACTER 1: So there's your answer. That's why we had all those ghosts.

CHARACTER 2: No kidding. That is nuts.

CHARACTER 1: I know, isn't it?

CHARACTER 2: Yes. But I accept your answer. Now I'm going to leave.

CHARACTER 3: Me too.

CHARACTER 1: I understand.

The other thing about Elsewhere, which is dicier to talk about, is that the novella occupies a place in probably the smallest off-shoot of the genre: optimistic horror. Seen from a certain point of view -- the point of view Blatty would like you to take -- even the shocking horror of The Exorcist is optimistic. Blatty is an unapologetic Catholic, and that's right there on the surface of his fiction. This is something that I quite frankly like about his work. His writing in the genre always reinforces the idea of a benevolent God, and of a peaceful afterlife, even while acknowledging the deep pain human beings suffer in this life. Such is the case with Elsewhere, which is fine, but this time Blatty doesn't attack his subject with the unblinking sharpness of The Exorcist. There's a meat-and-potatoes quality to his take on Catholicism in that book (and film) that I love. This time around he's more moony-eyed about the whole thing, more self-consciously mystical, and it makes the novella come off as soppy.

This isn't helped by his constant injection of humor, of the rapid-fire dialogue, one-liner variety. Some of this is funny, much of it is not, and there's generally just too damn much of it. There's always been humor in his serious fiction, even in The Exorcist, but the humor never overwhelmed the narrative. Here it does. Elsewhere would almost play as a supernatural comedy, if the humor was funnier.

Before reading Elsewhere, I hadn't read Blatty in many, many years. When I come back to a writer I've enjoyed in the past, after several years away, and find myself struggling to enjoy his or her work, I have to wonder if I've grown out of it, if my tastes have evolved to the point where this author has been left behind. I've wondered this about several horror writers, like Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch. But with Bloch and Matheson, the work I don't enjoy is almost always their late fiction, written well after their heyday. When I return to their older work, as I just did with Bloch, I find that I wasn't wrong to like them before...they were good. It's just that they eventually became tapped out. This may be the case with Blatty. It would be weird to say that I hope this is the case, because I would love it if Blatty got his old rhythm back. But he's never been prolific, and that may not happen, and Elsewhere may be his swan song. If so, that's a shame. Still, being able to say that you're the guy behind The Exorcist, Legion and The Ninth Configuration -- in both their novel and film incarnations -- ain't too shabby.

Queue Reviews! Or, Possibly, a Less Crappy Title!

If I don't get started on this post now, I never will, so the title is going to have to stand until I think of something better (i.e., not horrible) and go back and change it.

So anyway. Capsule reviews of previous Netflix rentals, is what this is all about, you see. I mean to write this one several days ago, but other posts and -- let us not forget -- laziness have pushed it until today. I watched all three of these films last weekend, so my memory, and therefore reviews, of them won't be as sharp as I'd like. Also, I slept in really late this morning, and it's fuzzing up my brain. And now that my excuses are all in play, I shall proceed.

Brute Force - d. Jules Dassin (1947) - This film, if you haven't seen it, is kind of messed up. It's a prison film of the "noble criminal" variety, meaning that all the inmates we discover anything about are basically good guys who, through desperation or a brief, minor weakness, have transgressed the law. Their punishment ends up far outweighing their crimes, because not only do they have to go to prison (a fate, the movie seemed to imply, that even criminals should be spared), but they have Hume Cronyn's sadistic prison guard making their lives hell.

But I don't mean to sound so negative. This is really, in many ways, an excellent film. Burt Lancaster, Charles Bickford, Roman Bohnen, and especially Cronyn, give terrific performances, and the film looks beautiful -- the last twenty or so minutes of this film highlights the odd, otherworldly beauty that black and white photography can bring to screen violence. But the "noble criminal" cliche', while fine in small doses, when taken to its extreme rankles me quite a bit. Yes, it's true, I'm not a fan of Bonnie and Clyde for much the same reason.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul - d. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974) - So, okay, I don't know much about Fassbinder's aesthetic (by which I mean what was planned and what wasn't) or his influences (beyond what I can try and guess at), so I'll just ask straight-out: are the sudden shots of melodrama injected into this otherwise spare, almost kitchen-sink drama, intentional? Obviously they're intentional, because he put them there, but did he intend them to play like melodrama?

Quickly, for those who don't know, this is the story of Emmi, a middle-aged German woman, and Ali, a Moroccan immigrant worker many years her junior, who fall in love and have to weather the prejudices of a German society who remembers all too well the Munich Olypmics massacre of two years previous. And to be honest, with that set up, the film is almost as schematic as you might guess. So add that to the occasionally jarring melodrama (Ali's sudden collapses and illness), and I have to ask, "Okay, so why is this still so compelling?" Because I did find it very compelling, and I have to admit that I haven't yet figured out why. Perhaps Fassbinder is trying to remind us that however much an audience might giggle at the overheated nature of melodrama, they may be doing so because they can sometimes recognize the reality of it, and Fassbinder does this by wrapping the more eyebrow-raising moments of his film in the most straightforward, stripped-down and down-played style possible. Maybe.

De Sade - d. Cy Endfield (1969) - Sorry, Cy Endfield and Richard Matheson, but this film is trash. For one thing, the film is not, as I'd previously thought, a horror film, but rather a frickin' biopic as fever dream, or fever dream as biopic, or some such nonsense. It's fractured, in any case, and not to any positive effect that I could see.

Keir Dullea is ridiculously miscast as De Sade, a man whose adult drift into perversion and, well, sadism was all instigated when he was but an innocent youth, whose uncle (John Huston, less badly miscast) exposed him to cruel and painful sexual humiliation. And there you have it. Now just imagine how the rest of a movie with such a premise might play out, but, you know, fracture it. Also, every so often put a red filter on your lens. I would also add that you shouldn't forget about tits, but I hardly think I need to point that out.

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NEXT IN THE QUEUE: Young Mr. Lincoln, My Favorite Year, and Renoir's The River