Inky Horizons

I've been getting over a cold these last couple of days so haven't blogged much. I feel better today.

Everyone is all up in arms over the movie Avatar. People either love it or hate it which is pretty much what you can say about most things in life. I must say I have no interest in watching it. Hollywood bores me for the most part. I don't like being talked down to or patronized, and that's what Hollywood does best. Anyway, it's James Cameron, people. You were expecting something more from this guy? C'mon. Film is dead. Just enjoy the visuals and stop trying to think. Hollywood doesn't want you to think. Not anymore. And you should have known that before going in.

Plus, I've read a LOT of SF. I know all the plots and there weren't that many to begin with. (The same argument can be made for any genre.) Science fiction isn't a very wide pool, but from a literary perspective it's fairly deep. Even so you can read through and exhaust the field within a decade or so, and I've been reading this stuff (both classics and hackery) since I was eleven. So. Yeah. I've seen it all.   Okay. Hollywood made some good SF films that were ground-breaking. Metropolis, 2001 and Gattaca come to mind. Not much else, I'm afraid. Nothing pops out.

On to more important news. I had a good Christmas. It snowed! I got The Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft, a new electric shaver, and some DVD movies from Santa. I also ate some turkey and ham over the holidays. But now I'm turkeyed and hammed out so tonight I'll just have frozen pizza, haha. My life is simple. I prefer it that way.

I thought about posting a Year in Review thingy. Lots of other writers are doing it. But that's not me. It's not something I would do, listing all the stories I wrote and sold and placed during the year There were almost a dozen or so. I had a good year, writing-wise. I made some contacts and made some progress in the field. Can't complain about that. I'm satisfied. That's always been my writing goal. So long as I make progress.

I made a decision about the Haxan novel over the weekend. I'm going to write it. Dunno what shape it will take, trad western, full-blown fantasy or something in between. But I am going to write this novel. That much I've decided.

That's all for now. Hope to have other stuff for you when I get over this cold. See ya soon.  :)

If you haven't seen this phenomenal silent film then by all means do. It's a Swedish film about witchcraft and the frenzied denials and condemnations that surrounded it during the Middle Ages, and up until the present. Well, 1922, anyway, which is when this film was made.

The visuals of Haxan are astounding, on a par with any CGI magic you see today. These pics only represent a fraction of what is in the film. It's an absolutely gorgeous piece of art and seriously, if you haven't seen it, try. You will not be disappointed.

Because, you know, she's awesome. And it's October and coming on Halloween fast. And it's in honor of her great work in Nosferatu the Vampyre with Klaus Kinski. And every Halloween since I've joined LJ I've posted Isabelle Adjani pics. So, yeah. It's a tradition. *nods*

Here's the "white rats" scene from the 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre. It works all on its own as a short-short. Amazing film making, imo.

Okay. So I have a thing for Isabelle Adjani. (That's the rumor, anyway.) Which doesn't mean I don't think Nosferatu with her and Klaus Kinski is a stand up classic in every sense of the word. In fact I believe it's the best retelling of Dracula since the PBS production decades ago. (Wow, that dates me. Eep.)

But. Yeah. Isabelle Adjani is in it. And that scene with the white rats still creeps me out big time and you know how jaded I am when it comes to movies.   *nods*

I learned he died today at the age of 80. I really loved the TV series "The Prisoner"  and thought it was one of the best things I've EVER seen on television.  Funny that I posted a link to this series just a few days ago, too. He was also very good in Ice Station Zebra (he often played the same type of character) and the series "Secret Agent" which was one of the few believable cold war spy shows on TV. 

He'll be missed by me. I liked him a lot.

I love film. I'm not a huge fan of movies per se, but I do love film.  I saw a great one recently, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.

This is a silent film from 1927 with a great score.  It's the only film I know in which an entire category was invented so it could win an Oscar that year. It's an Expressionist film, but it's not Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Expressionism, even though the characters are named The Man, The Wife, The Woman from the City and they hail from places like The Farm and City.  Very fundamental. But the use of light and shadow, and Murnau's interest in light as a character in the film, is nothing less than fantastic. Murnau also directed the original Nosferatu, another silent film you should definitely watch should you ever get the chance.

But back to Sunrise.  Of course, the woman from the city is a typical man-eating Vamp who smokes cigarettes and likes showing the outline of her legs through her black dress.  She has mesmerized The Man and while they are making love on the shore of the water by moonlight she talks him into drowning his wife and making it look like an accident.  He is tormented. We see scenes of him wrestling with his conscience as ghostly images of The Woman from the City embraces and kisses him.  He decides to go through with the murder.

Everything in this film works, even, I suspect, quite by accident. In one scene, as The Man and The Wife are in a boat headed across the water and come to tie up at a pier, we see a black swirl of water behind her. It's a spooky metaphor for the danger she's in, and I'm quite certain it's real and not a special effect.

Janet Gaynor plays The Wife. Rarely have I ever seen anyone as fragile and innately vulnerable as she appears on screen. She is perfect for the role, as is Margaret Livingston who plays the Vamp.

I don't want to say much else about the plot. I don't want to spoil it for you. But the search on the water by lamplight (an incredible achievement considering the technology back then) has been copied in a ton of films since.  And for good reason: it's fucking AWESOME. The play of light on water, the light and shadow on the faces...Wow.

I highly recommend this film. If you ever get the chance I urge you to see it. And if you do, you'll find your outlook on life changes a little.

It's that good, and that powerful.

For the first time today I watched the final hour of the Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith.

Wow. Was that ever bad.  I mean slimy-garbage-rotting-in-the-noonday-sun bad.  Bad writing, bad acting, bad science fiction.  Just overall bad.  The quintessential definition, if you will. I'm glad I only dedicated an hour to this turkey.  I shudder to think what my current mindset would be if I had watched the entire film.

But, here's the problem I'm now facing.  I've lost an hour of my life.  I ain't ever gonna get that hour back.  So I need your help.

Would someone please loan me an hour of their life so I can regain the time I lost? Surely, someone somewhere has a free hour they're not using and will be willing to give it to me.  I'm begging you.  Have a heart.  Give me just one little measly hour of your life and I'll be forever grateful.

It would also be nice if more than one of you donated an hour so then I could start stockpiling them for such another emergency.  But let's just start with the single hour first and see how things progress.

Remember, it's from little acorns great oaks grow.  Thank you.

I guess it had to happen. After the documentaries on the Civil War, baseball and jazz...Ken Burns, the pre-eminent documentarian for PBS, had to have a clinker.  And, wow, does this puppy about the United States in WWII ever clink. And clunk.

It's an understandable subject for Burns, but it fails on a lot of different and unexpected levels.  If you close your eyes then from nothing but the musical soundtrack you'd think you were listening to his excellent documentary about The Civil War.  But then he pumps some jazz in there. Then comes some modern stuff by Norah Jones. It doesn't fit and it doesn't work.

A big part of the problem with this documentary is timing. Americans right now are sick and goddamn tired of hearing about war. Even a documentary about WWII, the last "black and white" war, the last "good war" in this nation's history, is going to have a hard time fighting that tide.  I expect Burns knows this, but he still tries to wring emotions from us and bring forth tears through his usual cinematic tricks. Except, those tricks are long-in-tooth. He's delved into the same barrel once too often. We're not falling for it  and there are moments when what we see almost approaches parody.

Aside from these faults, the lethargic narration by Keith David (David McCullough where are you?!) that goddamn near puts you to sleep, the complete disregard of global forces --both economic and political -- that brought us into this war, the fact Burns pretty much eschews the global nature (I forgive him for that because his main interest has always been national, even in his other documentaries), aside from all that...this film is just boring.  And he doesn't get a pass from me for being boring.

We don't ever get to really know the people he is telling us about.  Men and women who served in this great conflict are simply presented as "Marine" or "Pilot" or "Nurse".  How fucking lazy can you get?  There aren't the strong personal narratives that swept us along through a film like The Civil War. This is more of a mish-mash than anything else, and coming from Burns that is not only unanticipated  -- it's downright disturbing.

Like it or not, everything Burns does will always be compared to The Civil War.  Maybe that's not fair, but he's never going to be able to escape that.  In this case the effort borders on sophomoric.

I've seen many documentaries on WWII. I consider myself something of an armchair expert on them.  The World at War, a 26-part series produced by the BBC and narrated by Laurence Olivier, is still considered the gold standard.  And though its scope is global in nature, it does a much better job examining America's role and how the war affected our civilians and soldiers than this sloppy effort by Burns.

This series is still running on PBS, if you care. The first episode aired last night.  But I will not be watching the rest of this film. This documentary is uninteresting, comes at the wrong time, does not draw us deeply enough into the personal and emotional feelings of the combatants...and is just plain dull.

On the strength of the first episode I can honestly say I do not recommend putting aside the time it would take to watch the remainder of this series. Don't waste your time.

The Devil's Rejects (2005) is the sequel to Rob Zombie's excellent horror film House of 1000 Corpses which we reviewed earlier.  Except it's less of a sequel than an entirely different film altogether.  All the old gang is reprised: Sid Haig as the clown head of the psychotic Firefly family, Sherri Moon Zombie as his blood-thirsty daughter Baby,  and everyone else.  The actor who played the grandfather in the original film died before production so Zombie dedicated this film to him.  A nice touch.

The film opens with the cops surrounding the Fireflys' secluded home. Seems the local law enforcement has finally figured out where all those missing people went and who is responsible.  In a violent shootout the Fireflys escape but Mother Firefly is captured by the Sheriff; his brother fell victim to the family's predations.

The remaining members of the family go on a shooting and kidnapping spree.  At first you're thinking, "This is no different from any other pyschos-on-the-loose-who-kill-and-torture film."  Seen it a dozen times, right?  Hell, it's even derivative of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers.  Yawn.

But I want you to stick with this film.

You see, Zombie, who wrote and directed The Devil's Rejects, knows what he's doing.  He knows you've seen this setup before.  When he switches gears on you (and he will) you realize he's telling you, "Okay, this is how these films used to be made...but I'm changing the formula."

My God, does he ever.

The Fireflys drive to Father Firefly's half-brother who runs a whore house in the desert.  Meanwhile, the obsessed Sheriff hires two bounty hunters to find the family.  He then goes to interrogate Mother Firefly, but loses it and guts her with a hunting knife in an act that suggests sexual intercourse.  As the life goes out of her ecstatic eyes he kisses her blood-stained lips.

As you may have guessed there's no Good vs. Evil in this film. It's Evil vs. Evil.  And no one looks good; Zombie shoots and blocks the scenes so the light is always harsh; people's faces are revealed as corrugations and lines which delineate their inner demons.  No one, even the hapless victims of which there are many, escape this harsh exposure under Zombie's camera.

In a mesmerizing sequence shot with music and no sound the bounty hunters invade the whore house and capture the Fireflys.  The Sheriff drives them in a convertible back to their home.  He will exact his revenge there.  He ties them to chairs and nail-guns photographs of their victims to their chests.  There is  a crucifixion scene.  Finally, he douses the place with kerosene and lights it up, but not without releasing Baby and telling her to run for her life.  He wants to hunt her down.

Outside Baby ducks into a cattle chute, following the metal railings into the dark.  The Sheriff comes after her wielding an axe.  We are reminded of the scene in the original film where Baby was chasing the teenager in the bunny suit before she stabbed her victim and licked her knife under the full moon.  The Sheriff pauses, a smile on his face, and remarks, "I smell rabbit."

Baby is now flat out running.  Time to slow her up.  He pulls his sidearm and fires.  The round goes through her calf.  "I bet that hurt," he tells her.  "I could hear the bone shatter."

But he wants to show Baby that Karmic payback can be a real bitch so he puts the axe aside and begins to beat her with a thick leather strap.  Baby is clawing and squirming on the hard desert floor in a vain attempt to get away.  The Sheriff asks her if she likes being a victim, likes being tortured by a sadist.  Hey, this is Baby we're talking about.  You're goddamn right she does.

But the Sheriff has made a mortal mistake.  He forgot to check his six when in the presence of a Firefly.  Baby's brother, Tiny, an eight-foot shambling freak, saves her life.  Whaddya know, that axe came in handy after all.

Tiny saves the Father and Brother Otis from the fire.  They tell him they will be back to get him.  Tiny nods and, with his deformed body silhouetted against the orange conflagration, he shambles back inside the burning house to die.

The Fireflys escape only to come upon a police roadblock the next day while "Free Bird" plays in the background.  The final assault begins.  Again reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde but with Zombie's own surrealistic touch added to the mix.  The credits roll scored by "Seed of Memory" by Terry Reid while we are shown sweeping camera moves that fly along the road and arc above the scrub-covered hills as if in a vain attempt to escape the carnage. When the screen goes black we say softly to ourselves, "Wow."

Rob Zombie has without a doubt become the preeminent director of the horror and violence genre.  His use of music for the soundtrack is nothing less than phenomenal.  He is not only willing to take chances with both material and artistry, but to demand this is the direction horror must turn if it wants to survive, even evolve, as a genre.  Don't miss this one.

Horror is a visceral medium.  And when it comes to movies, horror can be very visceral indeed.  I tend to love the old Universal monsters, mainly for personal reasons.  They are my favorite.  And when it comes to other horror movies I lean towards surrealism like the excellent Suspiria by Dario Argento.

But there are other movies that, after you see them, change you in some way -- and not always for the better.   I Spit on Your Grave is such a movie, along with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and The Hills Have Eyes.  Though a slick mainstream movie, I would place The Exorcist in that same category.

House of 1000 Corpses is another one.

This is a movie written and directed by Rob Zombie.  There's a ton of in-jokes and black humor sprinkled throughout this film like lost spatters of black blood topped with candy sprinkles.  The comedy is dark, very dark.  But there's fun here, too. The main characters are named Captain Spaulding, Otis Driftwood and Rufus Firefly.  All names from Groucho Marx characters.  Plus, Karen Black plays the matriarch of the Firefly family with outright verve and gusto. Hell, that's a selling point in its favor right there. 

Zombie wanted this to be an homage to the horror films of the '70s.   Early on he wanted to make the film with the same equipment and technology available to directors at that time, but money and creative pressure got in his way.  There's still a lot here to entertain.  And despite the body count and the buckets of gore, this film is entertaining. Quick cuts of old black and white horror movie hosts and off screen monologues by principle characters a la Natural Born Killers keeps us confused and riveted.  Judicious use of sound, color, and a fantastic music track make the experience memorable. 

The movie starts with four teenagers are on a road trip across America writing about weird places tourists might want to visit.  In a shithole of a town in the Deep South they learn of a local legend called Dr. Satan.  In the interim they stumble across a family of freaks.  Oh, and it's Hallowe'en Eve. So far it's your normal horror-type movie fare, right?  Wrong. 

Dead wrong.

From the candlelit dinner to the tortured cheerleaders upstairs to the ersatz floor show we are now on a mind-numbing roller coaster ride...and it's getting more claustrophobic with each twist and turn.  The police show up.  They're whacked by the freaks, and one of the deputies is killed in what has to be the longest suspenseful pauses in moviedom as the action reverts to slow motion, the camera flies away in the sky, yet  we cannot turn from what we know is going to happen.   It is the distance from which Zombie forces us to watch, not the murder, that is the true horror.

But what of our four young friends?  Well, it doesn't look good.  One of the male characters is asked by Baby to guess who her favorite movie actress is. Oh, and she's holding a straight razor at the time.   He guesses Marilyn Monroe.  Nope, it's Bette Davis.  Fitting she would choose such a notorious man-eater. Baby commences to scalp the young lad while she giggles.  That's not something you see everyday.

The other poor fellow, well, let's just say  "Fish Boy" and leave it at that.  The two girls are then dressed in bunny suits, along with our scalped friend, and taken outside on Halloween night for more fun and frivolity.  Teenagers dressed as bunnies on a night when they are to be tortured and murdered.  That's not something you see everyday, either.

One of the girls runs.  She's chased down by Baby and stabbed.  Baby licks her knife under the light of a full moon. The other two are thrown in a casket and lowered into a well.  The tortured victims from the past who are living down there reach out of the black water and drag them out, but one girl escapes.  She finds a tunnel and, still wearing her bunny suit, goes deeper into the black earth.

Shades of Alice in Wonderland...except what she's found is a labyrinth of 1000 corpses, more past victims of the Firefly family. She loses her bunny suit and stumbles into the lair of Dr. Satan.  Wow, he's not a legend after all, who would have guessed?  But he's deeply involved in an "experiment."  She escapes his axe-wielding associate, crawls out into the daylight and a car comes down a dirt road to pick her up.

The denouement is typical, and most horror movies would end the shenanigans right there.  But Zombie isn't done with us quite yet.  Our heroine awakens --  only to find herself strapped to Dr. Satan's table, ready to be his next "experiment."  The final thirty seconds when she awakens and realizes where she is just might be the scariest thirty seconds I've ever witnessed in any horror film.  We don't see anything, just her face, but that's more than enough.

This movie weathered a lot of controversy when it was released in 1997.  Much of it came from young adults who think Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer are the only models available for horror movies.  But this isn't the cartoonish efforts of serial movies like Friday the 13th and the one-liner ridden and outlandish Nightmare on Elm Streets.  Rob Zombie knows what horror, real horror, is all about.  Yes, there is black comedy and there is camp in House of 1000 Corpses, but there's film-making here as well. Zombie isn't phoning it in.  This movie wasn't written by a tube worm, as evidenced by the deliciously black comedic elements of naming people after Groucho Marx  characters and having teenagers abused whilst wearing cute bunny suits.  Horror, on any level, rarely gets any better than that.

Time has been kind to Corpses.  A decade has mellowed much of the original criticism it received, and Zombie made a sequel, The Devil's Rejects, which continued the bloody antics of the Firefly family.  The latter movie even made money and garnered some critical acclaim. 

If you're looking for something different, a horror film that breaks the mold, if you want to feel the walls close in on you, rent House of 1000 Corpses.  Then turn out the lights and hang onto a friend.

I don't watch much television.  I have this funny aversion to being talked down to and approached as if I was a mouth-breathing fool.  (Just a fool, thank you very much.)  Just me, I guess.  But I do watch movies on television, especially classic movies.  And over the last week I saw three.  The first two I'd seen before...the third was new.

My Dinner With Andre
This is one of the best movies about philosophy ever filmed.  Even if you don't like philosophy you're going to like this film.  It's about two friends in a French restaurant.   One is the Everyman and the other is Knowledge and they both learn from each other.  Nothing but dialogue here and it's very well written.  Anyone who wants to learn how to write good dialogue would be well advised to study the rhythms of words and sentences in this film.  Awesome.

The Seventh Seal
A knight (Max Von Sydow) returns from the crusades doubting God and plays a game of chess with Death.  Visually stunning and beautifully crafted this film draws you right in and never lets you go.  Please, if you've never seen this movie get hold of a copy.  I promise you won't be disappointed.

The Virgin Spring
Another Swedish film with Max Von Sydow.  I don't want to give too much away about this story set in medieval times.  A young woman is raped.  Violence and retribution and sacrifice ensue.  There is a scene of violence towards the end which elicited an "Oh, my God!" exclamation from me.  That's not easy to do, my friend.  But this film did it.  And as you watch you wonder, "So what's with the title?  What's the virgin spring?"  And then you see it and again you think with unbelievable wonder, "Oh. My. God."

Truly wonderful.  Don't miss this one, either, if you get the chance.

(No spoilers here.  I don't do spoilers.)

I saw the new movie last night and must say I liked it quite a lot.  This is no faint praise coming from me.  As a rule I loathe many of the Bond movies because they're so cartoonish.  This one was quite different, more in line with the true character in Fleming's novels than a well-dressed clown spouting one-liners to negate the comedic violence.  I know the producers chose this direction because they wanted to distance themselves from the goofy Austin Powers films which were nothing more than a parody of earlier Bond films... which had already become parodies of themselves!

God, how I hated that.

You see, the James Bond novels played a very large part in my growth and desire to be a writer.  My father introduced me to them when I was twelve years old and I devoured them.  I'm very picky, therefore, about my Bond actors and the movies themselves.  This one did not disappoint me.

The producers of Casino Royale also had the good sense to realize the actor playing James Bond is only as good as the villain he faces.  Le Chiffre was a sadistic bastard in the novel and he's played that way here, too.  And anyone who's ever read the novel will be gripping throughout the movie because they know what's coming later in the film. Again, Royale doesn't disappoint, nor with the love interest between Bond and Vesper, (Bond's first and really only love until me met Tracy) along with its inevitable conclusion.

The novel itself is somewhat famous for its last line.  (Mickey Spillane copied something like it for his Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury.) The line appears here in the film, though not at the very end which lessens its impact.  It's still powerful, however, played against the backdrop of a crumbling building as metaphor for Bond's life.

All in all, a very good film. Bond is back, thank God, in a reincarnation that would make Fleming proud. 

Go see it.

I like werewolf movies.  No, let me rephrase that.  I like good werewolf movies.  My favorite is The Wolfman (1941) with Lon Chaney, Jr.  And from a writerly perspective it gives me a tickle to know the writer of that film, Curt Siodmak, made most of the werewolf tropes out of whole cloth.  But they're as accepted today as any legend.  And it's hard to pass up a late night showing on TCM with Chaney's tour de force  performance in Frankensteim Meets the Wofman (1943).  That final scene of the dam breaking and flooding Frankenstein's lab while the fur flies is one of the best in the genre.  Not to mention the fact Maria Ouspenskaya appears in both films; she's always a treat to watch with her heavy accent and sorrowful, brooding manner.  Great fun.

 But last year I came across a trilogy and had a chance to review them again recently, and, boy, are they great.

It's the Ginger Snaps trilogy.  Never heard of it?  I'm not surprised.  They were indies shot in Canada which gives them a different feel both in tone and emotional texture than the slickly produced cartoonish efforts we see out of Hollywood.

The first movie, Ginger Snaps, dwells on two sisters who decide that if one of them dies the other will kill herself.  There's the usual teenage angst and sexual awakening you would expect to see in a film about  a 16 and 15 year old sisters.  But Ginger Snaps ties those deep and powerful emotions into a stylish reworking of the werewolf mythos.   So when Ginger gets the bite, her sister, Brigitte, must do everything she can to protect her.  It's a stylish film with a look and dialogue that really pushes the limits both in context and what we thought we knew about werewolves.  And you won't need a silver bullet to whack one, because as Brigitte observes, a big knife will do since "they aren't superheroes."  Classic.

Of course, things start going downhill fast for the sisters.  Dogs start disappearing.  Ginger suddenly has a huge craving for meat.  When a tail appears she and Brigitte have to duct-tape it to her leg.  Well, no one ever said being a wolf-girl was easy.

The second movie is called Ginger Snaps: Unleashed.  Here's where the trilogy takes a very unexpected turn.  Ordinarily, there would just be much more blood-spattering and chomping in a sequel like this.  Not so with the Ginger movies.  Now Brigitte is in an insane asylum, waiting for the curse to take hold of her while she wrestles with a horrific decision she had to make in the original film.  This movie dwells more on the psychological aspect of wolfdom than the usual crunching of bone by the light of a silvery moon.  Oh, and there's a male werewolf out there who  wants to mate with Brigitte if she would just hurry up and let the transformation take its natural course.

Just when you think you're safe, the third movie, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning is actually a prequel to the other two.  Better yet, you aren't sure if this is a parallel universe, an alternate history, or the beginning of an eternal curse involving these two young women.  Maybe it's all three.  It doesn't matter because the sisters are together again in 19th Century Canada in the dead of winter and they've come upon a fort while packs of hungry wolves roam the frozen countryside.  Hang on tight to a friend when you watch this one because it's a doozy.

The Ginger Snaps movies.   You should check them out even if you're not a werewolf fan.  It's great story arc filled with pathos and sharp humor and biting (pun intended) dialogue.  Give 'em a peek if you have the time....