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Serious crisis
2004-06-05 00:42:48
Well, I had lots of crap to write about. In fact, as a one-in-a-milennium non-gaming Friday, I was gonna make a night of knocking away the pile of vids awaiting review sitting next to me. Few days ago, I already piled up two full reviews. But I ain’t gonna post ‘em now.
Yesterday I went to see the new Harry Potter movie. Blood was crap ‘cause my cell cultures weren’t confluent, and I might as well spend the night doing something enjoyable. So I team up with Tim from work, and we arrange to go to the midnight showing.
‘Cept Tim isn’t all that punctual. I spend until....uh.....7:30? at work waiting for him to get his act together so we can go get tickets (and incidentally hit the comic store for the weekly inoculation). Long story short, between him treating me to dinner and the running around town necessary to get tickets, I don’t make it back to my room until 10:00. Laze around until 11:00, pick up Tim and go to the movie.
Tonight I get a call from my dad. Seems that my roommates didn’t bother to give me a message yesterday. Or today.
My mom was in the hospital with a detached retina. Emergency surgery, the whole nine yards. Prognosis is good, but God dammit, these are her EYES.
And I was off in a comic store discussing the failings of current-gen X-men.
We’re celebrating her birthday tomorrow.
It may just be a reflection of my massive fuck-upped-ness, but I’m hit with an equal portion of overwhelming worry, and bottom-of-the-gut guilt. The whole emergency happened before I found out about it. Doctors, specialists, surgeons, and surgery. And the biggest concern I had was being off watching a fucking kid’s movie. I wasn’t there for them when they needed me, and it may just be dead coincidence that I didn’t find out, but I should’ve been there. I don’t talk about them much, but my parents are complete saints. Really. I hear all my friends complain about their dysfunctional families, and I just can’t relate. In my entire memory of existence, my parents have gotten into an argument that resulted in mother crying exactly once, and my father has had to sleep on the couch twice. How I ended up so thoroughly fucked up, I’ll never know.
My solution? To misquote Cerberus, “I’m gonna drink whiskey until the left side of my stomach starts hurting.”
Which means the preceding paragraphs are probably a bit more to-the-heart than I should really post in a public forum. So I hope everyone will excuse me if I retreat from the rest of the world for a bit. My family needs me.
(Incidentally, Starphoenix, sorry if I was a bit of an inconsiderate shithead. Your presence caught me completely off guard, and I’ve never been good at mixing my different groups of friends.)
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She took me back / to her high-end house.......I don't wanna talk about it...
2004-05-21 00:33:12
And I sit here eating a plate-full of something unidentifiable. After finally having a meeting of the minds with a couple of my new roommates, I discovered that none of them have much of anything in the way of food or dishes in any of the cupboards. But the cupboards and fridge and freezer are all stuffed to capacity.
Looks like my previous three French roommates all moved out without emptying ANYTHING out of the kitchen, so I’ve taken it upon myself to clear out some cabinet space by consuming the excess. Right now I have a plate of something called “Haldiram’s Aloo Bhujia” which are either fairly spicy deep-fried hash browns, or I’m rapidly giving myself food poisoning. Greasy as hell, whatever they are. On the positive side, I finished off their gallon-sized bottle of Kentucky burbon last night while watching another flick. Only about a shot and a half left in the bottle (whoa, busy little bees) but it turned out I really rather needed it. More on that in a bit.
In other news, an ad just came on featuring Lauren Ambrose, better known as Claire Fisher from “Six Feet Under.” I always rather liked her (the red hair didn’t hurt) but her character was always sort of a disaffected cringing violet. Not shy, so much as completely detached and disaffected from the world around her. Withdrawn. The kind of person who fades into the woodwork out of sheer apathy. If you had a similar opinion, see if you can catch “Psycho Beach Party” the next time it comes around. Wow. Ambrose plays Florence “Chicklet” Forrest, a straight send-up of the old “Gidget” films, with the split personality of an aggressive dominatrix named “Anne Bowman.” Try to imagine “Claire Fisher” playing either of those parts. In 1960. Wonderful absurdity remarkably well acted, and she gets to exit on one of the best stinger bits ever. I haven’t actually watched the whole thing all the way through, but always manage to catch it about 20% in, or am walking out the door when it starts. Always try to see as much of it as I can, though.
Bloggus interruptus: What the fucking hell? It appears that North Korea is ON FIRE. http://marmot.blogs.com/korea/2004/05/comrade_smokey_.html
(OK, those Bhujia things have definitely gone rotten....hunting for something else to eat......dammit, the milk’s already gone bad....)
Browsing through everyone else’s lj and e-mail is starting to depress me. Once again I get to watch as everyone else goes tooling off to conventions across the country and I’m not gonna get to join them. Got the money, just got no time. This is just aiding in the slow isolation of me from all my anime friends. I rarely find out about anything in the works until long after it’s over from everyone’s “weekend reports”, and even if I had known, I wouldn’t have been able to attend because my gaming is monopolizing my weekends. Or, alternately, I get blood in during the MIDDLE OF THE DAY on Friday, and I get to spend the whole fucking night running the stuff until six in the morning, at which point I’m absolutely wiped out for the rest of the weekend. Gahhh. I haven’t seen most of my anime friends in over two months now, and Patrick’s not even answering the e-mails I toss his way on AWA business. Getting a bit lonesome out here.
Incidentally, if ever you need to assess how dirty a carpeted floor is, and whether or not you need to vacuum, perform the following test.
A) Get a pair of eyeglasses. Yours, preferably.
B) Remove one of the screws from the eyeglass arm, detaching it from the frame.
C) Drop the screw on the carpet.
D) Try to find the screw
The resulting hunt will require you to stick your fumbling fingers into every single corner of the room. When you eventually have to give up, find yourself a thick paperclip or thumbtack to replace the screw.
Next up is the reason I needed that drink. Delving in among the videos in mount DVD last night for something I might feel like watching, I came across a disc I’d picked up a couple of months ago and completely forgotten about. It got reshuffled back within easy range by a recent avalanche, and looked like just what I wanted. I’d picked it up originally because of some vaguely-remembered reference to it being really formative in the modern horror flick. One of those films that heavily influenced a lot of subgenres, but, since the title was unfamiliar, sounded like something that the more recent generation just didn’t watch. Didn’t make it on TV, didn’t have a really evocative title, but was made by a pretty well-known director. Seemed from the cover art and the title to be a long-lost haunted-house film that’d fallen through the cracks. I’d guessed that it wasn’t watched because it was cheaply made, meaning I wanted to see it. The great original horror pieces that really laid the groundwork of modern horror are more frequently alluded to then they’re actually watched, and I’m curious enough to want to delve those depths.
OK, before I go any further, I have to say this. I was wrong in almost every respect of my guesses about the flick. I’m really only writing this particular review to cleanse the film outta my mind. Not funny in any human way. Not enjoyable. The only way I can issue the following warning effectively is to ask those of you who’ve been reading my lj for a while to consider very carefully who it is that is that is saying this.
This film is _sick_.
Consider that your warning to skip this review.
No, really. I mean it. Horror as a genre has some dark roots. Most people laugh this stuff off after the umpteenth “Scream”, toy-fest “creature features”, the predictable slasher flicks, or the rollercoaster rides that are the jump-through-the-window “Resident Evil” games, but every once in a while you’ll come across something that gets a little too close to the essence. I’m talking about something _bad_. You ever wonder what a “seamy underbelly” looked like? Well, now I’ve seen one. And I’m not all that sure I’m a better person for it. I wrote a while back that a film which was both “vicious” and “severe” would be almost unwatchable.
Guess what.
The flick starts with the director/writer coming out and introducing himself. It’s Wes Craven, and he tells us that the following movie, the first one he, himself, wrote, is the most complete version ever released since the original theater run back in 1971. Keeping that in mind, he tells us to “remove any small children or innocent animals from the room.” He actually seems a touch trepidatious about taking credit for this one
Hm?
Sorry?
“Nightmare on Elm Street?
Heh.
No. Craven wrote several other films before that one.
A couple of you have probably caught on at this point, but I’ll go ahead and spell it out for the rest of you. The film I needed the drink for is called “The Last House on the Left.” Alternate titles include “Night of Vengance” and “Sex Crime of the Century.”
Haunted House story? Damn was I off the mark.
Have you ever seen one of those cautionary drug stories from the late sixties? The ones where some good girl falls in with a “bad crowd” of rough-talking crack pushers and, through a series of permissive decisions not sanctioned by the PTA/Catholic Church/Community Council/Mom, ends up in the thick of it, selling herself for her next hit, stuck in jail somewhere, murdered by drug lords, or miraculously saved from these fates by the intervention of some American-as-mom-and-apple-pie boyfriend? You know, the stuff that Jack Chick warns us about and then ends up as MST3K material?
This is like one of those movies except A) run out of control and B) the reel keeps going.
We start the film with Mari. Seems it’s her seventeenth birthday, and she’s celebrating by going out to a rock concert with her wilder, more worldly girlfriend. Our first shot is of her in the shower, getting ready for her first real big night out, and preemptively answering the implied question “will there be nudity in this film?” (The answer is “yes,” though you may wish differently later.)
There’s a bit of homey banter between the newly-budding girl (about her newly-buddings and lack of a bra) and her parents as she’s going out the door. There’s a particularly clever one about the “love generation” attending a concert where they kill live chickens, and a perfectly smarmy comeback from the “God mom! I’m grown up now!” Mari. (Reference to the Alice Cooper incident.) Dad gives her a brand new peace-sign pendent, a quick make-up kiss to mom, and she’s out the door with Patty on her first big adventure of adulthood.
Patty, being the worldly-wise girl she is, has hidden a bottle of booze out in the woods, and they engage in some rather innocent pillow-talk before driving into town. Whereupon they hear over the radio about two escaped convicts. “Murderers, dope pushers, and rapists....convicted of killing a priest and two nuns.”
HA! Milking a stereotype much, are we? Oh yes, and the report of the escape described a “strange, dark, animal-like woman who kicked one of the police-dogs to death.” Jeez, corny over-statement to make our audience dislike the villains of the piece? Boy, this should be good. Let’s expect a lot of posturing, a lot of threatening. Heck, with the description of the woman involved, maybe this is a werewolf movie! Oh, wait. Here’s the villains holed up in a city apartment. Let’s see them introduced....
Krug, the leader of the band. A bit like a thinner, more muscular John Belushi, with the thick Italian features, curly black hair, and brutish attitude. There’s the other convict “Weasel” who is....well....weasily, thin and angular...Steve Buscemi without the bug-eyes, and constantly playing with a switchblade in the stereotypical fashion of such 60’s “toughs”. Bit of a danger signal went off when the radio report described him as a “convicted pedophile” but....hell....it was the early 70’s! I mean, they must be throwing stuff like that in off a list.....it’s not like they made films that severe back then...
Right?
Then there’s Sadie. A rather entertainingly sexualized character, she’s sort of all over every character in the film (women too, which goes along weirdly with the Jack Chick angle). Hard drinking, hard-living, and sadistic enough to justify her name, she’s the one reported as “animal-like” in the police reports. Finally, there’s Junior. Scrawny kid about 22 or so, he’s constantly stoned, hooked on heroine by his own father (Krug) so he would be easily controllable, he either stoned into a hemp-level-conciousness, or sweating out the DTs for the whole film. We spend a little bit developing each of these characters with weird humor dashed in. Sadie, apparently Krug’s new squeeze, demands beer delivered to her in the bathtub. Junior wishes he was a frog. Oddly warped feminist banter is tossed around. Finally, we get to the crux of the matter....Sadie refuses to put out until they get a few more women around the place.
Enter Mari and Patty. Patty’s convinced Mari to go out looking for some weed dealer before the concert, and they wander the streets looking for a likely candidate. Junior, terminally out of focus on the apartment steps, looks like a good possibility, so they approach him. Through his drug-addled haze, he remembers to tell them that he has some quality Columbian up in the apartment. They follow him up and into the apartment, where the door gets slammed and locked behind them.
OK, the good part, right? Buncha screaming and running around followed by an improbable escape, probably with Junior’s addled help, right? Seems kinda early, but this is the way these things go, right?
Not exactly.
Junior gets his fix. Patty gets held down offscreen and raped while Mari watches, afraid to scream lest either of them get stabbed to death. During the torment leading up to the rape, we cut randomly back and forth between Krug and Co. and Mari’s family decorating the house for her birthday. As Krug starts slowly pulling the buttons off Patty’s blouse, we cut to Mari’s parents having a romantic evening with their daughter out of the house.
OK....wait. Not funny anymore.
Next scene: “Early next morning.”
OK.....REALLY not funny anymore. We’re not supposed to go here.
Horror, safe horror, really is the geeky repressed cousin of serious film. Maniacs want to dice up women, preferably in various states of undress. Or Satan wants to possess women’s bodies, forcing them to wear scanty clothing. Or the alien from outer-space needs women for “experiments” of some nefarious, unexplained, offscreen purpose. Hell, in the more severe flicks, the rape is implied through weird phrasing like “implant of the alien seed”.....But for a couple of thugs to actually hold women down and rape them? Logically it seems the natural extension of the on-screen action and plots....but it remains the unspoken code that the monsters or killers may always intend rape or sex, but never actually go through with it, or degenerate it to the level of shifted metaphor, like the bite of a vampire....leaving horror in the status of the scrawny, overimaginative high school geek with taped glasses who could never get within twenty feet of an attractive girl. All intent, no follow-through. ‘Cause God knows that takes more courage than the genre could muster. Most of the time. (Whoa....third Guinness....excuse if this gets odd...)
Anyway, six hours later the two girls get carted down, tied and gagged, to the trunk of the convict’s getaway car. They strike off towards Canada with the girls in the trunk. Meanwhile, Mari’s parents (no mention is made of Patty’s parents at any time during the film) have started to worry, and they call in the police. The police, a chief and one deputy, are the comedic relief of the film.
This is a mistake.
The film is WAY too heavy for comedic relief in any form. The cops are portrayed as the most absurd stumble-bums you’ve ever seen. It looks like they walked in out of a completely different film with an incompetent director, and just slow down the movie. It doesn’t lessen the impact of what’s coming (Oh....I’m sorry....did you think it didn’t get worse?), it just feels like someone changed the channel on you for a few minutes....drawing out the torment and torture by intercutting it with complete CRAP. (Really, the cop scenes are awful. I’m only going to mention them here, they’re so bad. Hearing a description of the broken down car they saw as the escape vehicle of the convicts, they set out to catch them, but run out of gas. Fuckin’ hell....the COPS run out of gas? And spend most of the rest of the film WALKING to the scene of the many crimes...punctuated only by an extremely racist scene of an old black woman with a truck full of chickens giving them a ride. They arrive too late to do ANYTHING.)
The fugitives drive out towards the Canadian border with the two girls in the trunk, Krug fucking a somewhat disinterested Sadie in the backseat while Weasel speculates on the “Sex Crime of the Century” (alternate title for the film). Unfortunately for them, their car breaks down.......right in front of Mari’s driveway. Where the cops are checking in with them.
Oh thank GOD! For a second I thought we were in really fucked-up territory! Absurd rescue via random chance and running home to mommy, right? Well, a bit Jack Chick for my tastes, but it sure as hell beats the alternative.
Nice try. The film’s only 1/3rd over.
Krug pops the trunk to get at the toolchest, and Patty takes the opportunity to bite down on his arm. HARD. In response he decides to haul the girls out into the woods for some “fun.”
Uh oh.
Well into the woods (and having lived in environs like that I can tell you how easily one is hidden from surrounding observers) the torment begins. Krug, much to the delight of Weasel and Sadie, forces Patty to “piss her pants”, threatening to cut up Mari if she doesn’t. When she does, to Sadie’s delight, Krug gets both the girls to strip off their clothing, and forces them to “make out” at knifepoint. Mari starts crying hysterically, unable to stop, despite Patty’s attempting to ease it for her with lines like “you and me, we’re the only ones here...just focus on me...”
OK, too fucking real here. I mentioned a while back during the “House of 1000 Corpses” review that the situation presented, of a handful of people kidnapping a stranger and torturing them to death, was probably a more accurate portrayal of actual serial killers than the romanticized Hannibal Lecter, but this is getting even closer to sociopathic behavior. Mari’s hysterical reaction here is getting way too real for me to be comfortable watching this film. (After the film, during the “making of” extras, it was revealed that Sandra Cassell was a method actor....which makes it just that much more unacceptably real....) Yet, strangely, I can’t stop watching it. It’s like a train wreck, not in construction, which is immaculate, but in subject matter, which puts a new meaning to “horror”, one not normally explored by the fans. Wow. Save yourself. Avoid this film.
Afterwards, when Krug goes back to the car for equipment, Patty persuades Weasel to let her put her clothes back on, and then makes a run for it, with the idea that Mari, unattended (and recognizing that she was only a few hundred yards from home) except for Junior, could go for help. Patty’s “escape” scene goes on FOREVER, with her running around the woods, pursued by Sadie and Weasel. Sadie actually catches her at one point, but Patty clubs her with a convenient rock, calling her a “stupid dyke” before running off. (Shit, Guinness #4. Need to pace myself.) By now I’m kinda in never-never land. Is the “dyke” comment a further application of the Chick hyperbolized morality stance, saying that lesbianism is equivalent to sadism and the hideous rape coming up? Is it, in accordance with all the other thoroughly violated standards, ridiculing the moralistic stance on homosexuality in the face of this hideous crime? Is it a throwaway line? Desperation in the face of certain death? I don’t know, even now.
Patty gets within a dozen yards of the main road before being cut off by Krug. In the sequence that follows we get way too real a feeling of Patty trying to beg herself out of the situation as Krug, Weasel, and Sadie close in. Sobbing, Patty backs into Weasel, who obligingly sinks 5 inches of stainless steel into her kidney, obligating a noiseless scream wide enough that you can see her molars.
The key to this film is asking “what is the worst possible thing that the filmmakers could do at this point?
How about just watching Patty?
Patty, bleeding heavily down her back, starts crawling away from the assembled group, only to be repeatedly kicked down by Weasel and Krug. Unconcerned, the trio eventually let Patty “get away” knowing she’s dying, and leisurely follow after her later. Patty manages enough energy in the end to spit blood in Weasel’s eye before they haul her upright and knife her repeatedly, each blow punctuated oddly with a synthesizer note. After Sadie plays briefly with Patty’s innard, they cut off one of her arms.
Back at the ranch, Mari’s only managed to get about halfway towards her house, since Junior isn’t entirely following along with this whole “please don’t let me get raped and murdered” theme, and gets cut off before she can reach help.
This is your last warning. I’m not fucking kidding. It gets worse from here. Skip to some friendlier journal. You don’t want to be in here today.
Everyone else gone? The real sick fucks still reading? The overly curious? The ones who just can’t stop looking? (Whoa....on Guinness #5....you may want similar support... I can’t feel my teeth.....)
Mari’s the only one left now. Surprising Mari with the disembodied arm of her friend, inspiring yet another round of hysterical screaming, we cut to Sadie and Weasel holding Mari down.
Krug is carving his name across her chest with the switchblade. One letter at a time. The screaming and crying is really, really disturbing, and way too fucking realistic. Normally, I’d applaud Sandra Cassel’s work here. Frankly, though, I think she may have needed therapy after this movie. Method acting may have its benefits, but sometimes you really REALLY need to be able to leave your work at work when you go home. (Except, according to the attached documentary, there was no “home”....everyone lived as a commune until the film was finished.)
What next? Why, Krug starts unbuckling her belt, of course. Held down, and in graphic emotional, if not visual, detail, Krug rapes Mari. We only watch their respective faces, a closeup of Krug drooling over Mari, and leaving a sticky string of saliva when he pulls away. Mari’s screaming stops for the passive frightening blankness.of a person who won’t believe what’s just happened. When it’s over, we ask, once again, what’s the worst possible thing that the filmmaker could do at this point?
Just keep watching.
Mari staggers up, distractedly straightening her clothes, and staggers downstage so she can throw up.
What happens next is completely unacceptable. I don’t know how to explain how unacceptable it is. I don’t really think I have an epithet strong enough for the situation. (Really. Leave fucking now.)
Music starts playing in the background. A song written and sung by David Hess (Krug) with the refrain “....now....you’re all... alone.....feeling.....that no.....body wants you....”. A sad tune, heavy with regret and lost innocence.
Focused, in closeup, on KRUG.
Oh. My. GOD.
Two solid minutes with this background music are focused on watching Krug, Weasel, and Sadie stand around and look awkward, uncomfortable, and regretful as Mari staggers off to a bush to throw up. I find it barely credible to believe, but Wes Craven wanted us to focus on the lost humanity, the loss of that last shred of innocence, of the RAPISTS at this point. Mari doesn’t even appear until she’s composed herself, says a children’s prayer, staggered to her feet, and started walking purposefully towards the lake at the bottom of the wooded hollow. Dazed and strangely resigned, she walks out into the lake to chest-depth, and just waits. Weasel hands Krug a revolver, and Krug shoots Mari repeatedly as she stands in the lake, floating off as she bleeds out.
I have bad news.
The film’s only half over.
But there is good news. News I’ll give to you, because I didn’t have the benefit of it when I was watching this film. I was literally terrified that I had just as much torment to endure before I reached the end of this film. Fortunately, I was incorrect. Everything from this point on is the “good” part of the film. Why? Because we shift gears. Suddenly we become a revenge flick. The director of the film had achieved more than I could express. I wanted this quartet of villains to _suffer_. Not just on a film level, but on a deep, visceral gauge. I liked Mari and Patty. And I wanted their killers to PAY. On some level, I suppose this speaks to the skill of the actors involved. On another level, maybe I should get another hobby.
Sadie, Krug, Weasel, and Junior spend a few minutes washing all the blood off of themselves and getting tidied up before going to find somewhere to shack up for a day or two. Where do they go?
Mari’s parents’ house.
I was sick to my stomach. I checked the run-time remaining on the DVD, (25 min) and felt nauseous at the prospect of Krug and co. torturing Mari’s parents to death. Fortunately, that’s not what happened. Holing up at Mari’s parents’ place, they pass themselves off, clumsily, as businessmen stranded by a broken car. During dinner, though, they start to give themselves away in unmistakable ways. Sadie deep-throats most of a bottle of wine. Mari’s mom spots the bite marks on Krug’s arm. Then, when junior is tossing the last of his guts into the toilet during a bout with the DT’s, Mari’s mom hears Sadie talking about the death of her daughter. She and her husband run down to the lakeside and recover their daughter’s body. At which point a plan begins to form.
Back at the house, Weasel has a weird dream where Mari’s Dad knocks out his teeth with a chisel. (In the commentary, Craven points to this as the first glimmerings of “Nightmare on Elm Street.”) Waking up and wandering out to the living room, he finds Mom. Mari’s mom distracts the insomniac Weasel and lures him out onto the house grounds with a promise of sex. Mari’s dad, meanwhile, begins booby-trapping the house in a way that also reminds me strongly of Kirstin’s work at the end of the first “Nightmare on Elm Street.” On the front lawn, Mari’s mom sweet-talks Weasel into a sex-trick where he has his hands tied behind his back, and proceeds to give him a blowjob. At the end of which, she bites down, spitting the result into the lake. Weasel screams a whole lot, but ends up bleeding out on the lakeside. Nothing’s actually shown, since they hadn’t the budget to manage such an effect.
Krug and Sadie wake up from the screams to find Mari’s dad pointing a shotgun at them. Krug’s quick thinking means that he only gets a round of buckshot in his shoulder, but manages to trip every booby-trap in the place (tripwire, slicked floor, and electrified front door) in his pursuit of Dad. Sadie flees out a side door, running into mom and loosing her switchblade in the process. Eventually Sadie flees across the lawn, only to charge headfirst into the pool. Mom catches her across the throat with the switchblade when Sadie tries to climb out, and she bleeds out in the pool. Krug, meanwhile, proves more than a match for Dad. That is, until Junior shows up and shoots Krug in the shoulder. Krug, taking advantage of Junior’s drugged out state, talks Junior into blowing his own head off. Dad retreats downstairs for his chainsaw, and there follows a rather frantic and extended retreat by Krug around the living room. I could tell (confirmed by the commentary) that the chainsaw they were using was real, as was the furniture, since it took so long for the saw to make a dent in anything that Krug held up in defense. (David Hess was scrambling around under a chainsaw on a polished wooden floor in his socks.) In the end, the cops (walking ever since their squad car ran outta gas) show up just in time to shout “Dr. Collingwood! NO!” as Mari’s dad cuts into Krug with the chainsaw.
The end.
This film is harrowing. Yes, it’s immature filmmaking, yes it’s low on budget, so we don’t go very far into anything costly. But what’s there is very difficult to watch on a level that you don’t normally encounter. The main actors got down a kind of realism that’s profoundly disturbing on several levels. So. Historic, highly influential, and notorious. Does that make it “good”?
Are you kidding me?
It doesn’t want to be “good”. It’s not entertainment, it’s a direct assault on the audience. It’s the original film trainwreck, something so horrible that you just can’t stop watching, and it does what many horror filmmakers have been trying to do for years, but always shy away when they get too close. It gets a visceral, horrific revulsion out of the audience that stays with you when you leave the theater. And it does it by finally acknowledging the elephant in the living room. The awful, hideous depravity people are capable of is captured on film without the cushions of clever cinematography, coolly-dark villains, deep symbolism, staged situations, or reveling in absurd levels of gore. In the director commentary, Craven directly states that he “...wanted to show something about violence that was quite nasty and ugly and protracted.... you don’t have the benefit of a cutaway in real life.” Merciless. On several levels it’s a violation of the audience’s expectations. This flick isn’t misogynistic, it’s flat sociopathic.
The feel of the film is heavily influenced by Craven’s previous work. Or rather his lack thereof. Craven’s first work in film was with a group doing documentaries, so the film has a very documentary feel to it, which somehow makes it much more powerful. Prefiguring, if not actively inspiring Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre a few years later (I don’t even know if Hooper even saw this particular flick) it has that same hideous realism to it as the documentary feel. In some ways, it seems that this film was Craven’s “Aswang,” but his raw talent and intent to film something so different pulled out a much more effective, skillful, and notorious film.
The director’s commentary (listened to mostly while facing away from the screen) and attached short documentaries were really instructive, getting to the heart of why it disturbed me so badly. First off, because it seems to disturb Wes and all of the actors who worked on it. Neither he nor Sean Cunningham (producer) had actually watched the film in over 20 years when they recorded the director’s track for this release. Wes, in particular, seems very much like he’d like to be able to disavow any connection with this film, and every time he and Sean Cunningham commented on a new actor as they appeared on screen, it was with a quip about how the actors probably wished they’d never worked in this project or that this had ruined their career. Fred Lincon (Weasel) apparently specifically said that this film was the only thing he’d done in his life that he was ashamed of, and he directs porn for a living now. Everyone else is a weird mix of actors who got out of the industry, and people who went on to long, improbable careers. Jeramie Rain (Sadie) married Richard Dreyfuss. David Hess, who played the rapist Krug, is a musician, and did almost all of the music for this film (the sole exception being one piece sung by Steve Chapin....Harry Chapin’s younger brother). Prior to this film he composed music for Elvis Presley and Pat Boone. Afterward, people avoided him in the street (in NEW YORK) and he ended up leaving the country.
The filmmaking was really a guerilla technique. Sneaking into a reservoir grounds, running around a rented house with a running chainsaw, Wes stated that they didn’t know what permits were, and that there were no stunt doubles, osha, ASPCA, or safety considerations....”all of the actors were in danger at all times in this film.” “Our hope in this scene was just that the actor didn’t electrocute himself.” Which just makes the effectiveness of the flick all the more improbable... Wes’s inexperience, lack of cash, and motley crew of a cast. Oh yeah, and by his own admission, Wes was stoned most of the time. (You should see the pic of him when he made this film. It looks like someone soaked an Oakridge boy.)
And yet, despite the beating one takes while watching this movie, it increased my respect for Wes Craven a thousandfold. Why?
There’s a scene in a Family Guy episode where Peter and Meg are talking and walking along in front of a continuous scrolling background. The scene goes on for quite a bit, when they suddenly look around and discover that they’ve walked onto an old Flintstones’ set. They both freeze in mid-sentence, go wide-eyed, and slowly reverse their path, gingerly walking out of frame.
Even while watching this film the first time through, I got the feeling that this was what Wes had done. Intent on the subject, working strenuously to bring realism and true visceral horror to the screen, he got so far into the process that he couldn’t see what he’d done. When it all came together, with literally terrified actresses and ad-libs hitting way too close to the mark, with realism victimizing the audience and decimating any expectations, I get the feeling that Wes stood up, looked around, and went real wide-eyed and quiet with the realization of where he’d wandered into. Then he gingerly started backing away.... into a career that may have been scary, but, again in his own words, “I went places in this film that I’ve never gone back to...and I never intend to.” Repeatedly during the worst scenes, Wes comments that stuff like this troubles you for years afterwards, wondering “was it right to put this on film.” (Any jokes and quips in the strong scenes stopped being brought up after the first third of the film.)
First time up at bat, and he hit the ball so hard it killed the pitcher.
But my point is that he _did_ do it. He could and did go into the project intending to shock and appall, and really did create something that had never been seen before, that profoundly disturbed people, and made a great many of them hate him. He got down to the real, fundamental core of shocking and appalling people, finding his limit, but didn’t know his own strength, and was (and is) surprised at how effectively and simply it was pulled off. He refers to the film as a “mindfuck” and a “black sheep” film that pulls the audience in and forces them to watch what’s normally ignored or stylized away into safe representation, but having made this, he recognized that he just went too far. Backing away slowly. How this couldn’t have been evident during the making of the film, I don’t know. There were many comments about how they “did the scene and cut for lunch, and nobody talked.” Sandra, especially, was apparently terrified of David Hess, lending more realism to the scenes than I like to think about.
A while back I wondered in a review precisely where Rob Zombie was taking his inspiration for “House of 1000 Corpses” from, and I think I have an answer for that now. But if they’re both absurdly severe, then why do I regard this film with horror, and H1000 with bored ridicule? Good question. Much of it goes to the stupid gimmickry of H1000, piling on one offense after another. The continuous acceleration of fantasy gore just went over the top into la-la land with a weird determination to somehow crawl out of the screen and throw rubber body parts into the audience. Last House on the Left had the documentary feel to it that allowed for a more personal, less ludicrous assault on the eyes.
Well. Now you’ve been warned. I was at a particular disadvantage in this film because I really didn’t know what was coming. Had I known, I’m extremely doubtful that I would have picked it up. The only film in the entire “rape-revenge” subgenre that I’ve ever even entertained the thought of watching was “I Spit on Your Grave”, and that only because it features so prominently in the literature. Picked up a VHS copy once, gave it a good look-over, and put it back down in disgust. Now I go online and find people easily ranking “Last House on the Left” as the most disturbing movie ever made.....with “I Spit on Your Grave” a distant second or third. Yeah. Just my luck.
Finally, one last bit.
At the beginning of the film there’s a little text blurb about how “this film is based on real events....the names have been changed to protect those still living”. Reminds me a lot of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which came out two years later. I called “bullshit” on that one, and I do the same here. In fact, in the director commentary of that part, Craven admits as much, saying that it’s a “complete lie”. However, that’s not to say that Wes Craven invented the whole thing. The story in the film actually does date from before Wes’s script. How far?
Guess.
Ten years? Hmmmm...... start of the sixties, fascination with mobster and gangster movies, etc., not a bad guess. Try older.
Forty years? Back in the years of Capone when the less stable members of his mob might actually get away with something like this? The days of the Fatty Arbuckle scandal? Another good guess. Wrong.
Six hundred years.
The story originates in a Norwegian folk tale from the 1400’s, but I’m having trouble locating anything with the explicit details of the original story. (Lupus_lupus, any chance of some help here?) The story was first told in film form by Ingmar Bergman in his film “The Virgin Spring”, for which I was able to find quite a bit of detail, but I’ve no idea how faithful he was to the original text, or even if he set it at the right time.
The folk tale, as Bergman tells it, concerns a pair of Christian parents, their daughter, and a foster daughter who hails back to the darker, more feral Odinic religion. A rather remarkable parallel wherein religion is now the dividing factor instead of the “love generation’s” ideals. The two girls are on a trip to a distant church where Karin (the non-foster daughter) is to offer votives, but they are waylaid by a pair of goatherders accompanied by a 13-year-old boy. They rape and kill the two girls, but then seek refuge from a storm. The irony is that the three killers accidentally seek refuge with the parents of the girl, and even try to sell them her clothes, which gives them away. The parents then exact bloody revenge on the killers.
Remember what I said about the dark roots of the genre? These went back a bit further than you expected, huh?
In summary, don’t watch this film. It was too expertly done and too effective.
I was gonna review something else besides, but I don’t really feel like trying to follow that act.
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Oh well, what the hell, it’s usually green....
2004-05-13 00:35:20
Just some catching up on the backlogged reviews. Not much gone on since yesterday, other than a $500 check that'd apparently been chasing me around campus from one mailbox to another finally made it into my hot little hands.
Before I get on to the next review, wherein I offer an approving gaze over a Japanese horror film, I must first disparage the Japanese, in order to maintain the balance.
Bubble tea is fucking disgusting.
How the hell can anyone drink that stuff? Great big chunks of dark tapioca that I constant have to beware of, lest I suck one into the back of my throat. Felt like I was trying to eat frog’s eggs. And I LIKE tapioca! Ig. Eventually had to just throw the thing away before I got another of the squishy week-old gumdrops in my mouth.
Bleh, bleh, bleh.
Now, on to the movie.
This one was unique. Picked it up at D*C some year, and it’s lounged around in mount DVD in its own polyvinyl bag for quite a while until I happened upon it after an avalanche. (Razza frazzin’) it’s called “Uzumaki” which the cover translates as “Vortex”, and I suspect is an oversimplification, because A) when they actually talk about an “uzumaki” in the film it’s more of a spiral pattern, and B) all the online translation utilities are flabbergasted by it. I don’t usually watch much Japanese horror, but that’s mostly due to a sort of cultural disconnect.
Weird coming from an anime fan? Just gimmie a minute.
I’ve been through the uberfan stage of anime watching. If you confront me with some new title, I’ll be able to pick up the box, flip it over, read a bit of the text, and get a pretty good idea A) what general genre it is and B) whether it’ll have any appeal to me. That’s just experience talking. I know when the girl on the cover looks just a little too frosting-coated (uh.....hyper sweet, I meant) that I’m gonna have to cringe my way through something insipid, or the characters are over-endowed helium balloons with no style or interesting characters, or if it’s JUST ONE MORE fantasy-world-with-giant-robots and nothing new to offer. And I can spot the ones that are just soft-core porn.
I can’t do that with live action. The naming conventions and the cover art are essentially alien to me. I swear to God, I have a really hard time telling sometimes if a film is an action/suspense/thriller, or an artsy cover on a porn flick. Japanese horror is the worst of the bunch, as it blends in every direction into action, kung-fu, sentai, giant rubber monsters, and really disturbing porn. Yakuza-zombie-gangsters? Is that horror? Action? Kung fu? ..........Comedy?
Now, I don’t mind not having any real idea what I’m getting into when I watch a film. That’s what I like about horror itself. But sometimes this is like discovering twenty minutes in that you rented a mime version of Steel Magnolias.
Which is all more the pity, because when the Japanese do horror.....just horror......they do it really damn well. They disturb and warp and re-imagine and introspect to produce some unique pieces. I’ve only ever seen the US version of “The Ring” but even there I could feel the distinctly Japanese feel to the story. Uzumaki I picked up because I happened upon a page or two of the serialized manga version. Flipping open a comic to a random page, I’m assaulted by the picture of twisted, coiling corpses crawling through a city (Kurouzu) laid out like an enormous spiral vortex. Whoa. Then there was something about someone stabbing themselves in the ear.
Geh.
Disturbing.
So when I saw that they’d made a movie version, I snapped it up.
Well, for a start, I can report the obvious. Like all good, pure Japanese horror, Uzumaki is completely insane. Kirie is a high-school girl living in a rather bleak and slightly introverted Japanese town. We meet her and a couple of the local townsfolk at the start to establish the setting, and then on the way home she happens upon her lifelong friend Shuichi’s father. He’s crouched on the sidewalk intensely filming a snail shell stuck on a fence. Kirie is unable to draw his attention away from the shell, and eventually walks on...convinced of the utter weirdness of her neighbor.
As it turns out, Shuichi’s father is obsessed with spirals. He carries that little video camera everywhere, filming every instance of spirals he can find. He collects them, stealing shop signs and day-long suckers. Eating only the naruman-roll from his miso soup. He becomes a crazy recluse, in that quietly-familial-abusive manner that all obsessed people do in Japanese films. Then he starts demonstrating....talents. Worse, he starts spreading it. Kirie’s father is a renowned potter, and Shuichi’s father commissions a plate with a vortex whorl in it from him. Kirie’s father starts to catch the obsession as well. Students at school too....
Then, the bad things start happening. Kirie has to deliver the commissioned plate to Shuichi’s father after dark. Unable to raise anyone, she follows the sound of a thunking-overbalanced laundry washer. Opening the lid, she finds Shuichi’s father.
He doesn’t look good, but he finally got the spiral thing down.
More disturbing, he’s still alive enough to manage one last, sudden, disturbing gesture
Appropriately enough, things start spiraling quickly downward. At the cremation of Shuichi’s father, the smoke forms an enormous spiral in the sky, then arcs down into the nearby lake. Shuichi’s long suffering mother completely freaks out, and they have to commit her after she starts finding......spirals......and removing them. (Look at your fingerprints.) A student takes a fall down the center of a spiral staircase. Another gets coiled around a car tire. Weirder shit starts happening. Students begin transforming into giant snails. The ludicrously stereotypical “most popular girl” (think of Kodachi Kuno) masters the theme in her hair, and it becomes a weird, abstract spiraling thing coiling off her head and filling the celine of whichever room wherever she struts. By the horrific end, the vortex is taking people left and right, distorting twisting them in one way or another into a hideous, intensely organic expression of the theme.
The director is especially clever at working the theme into his film technique as well. If you pay close attention, you’ll notice one scene in the park where a little spiral distortion in the film image, like a kind of dust devil, whirls out of frame just before you get a chance to focus on it. Several times during the film (most profoundly at the start) the camera circles in or out in a great whirling arc as it films one subject or another. (In one scene, a student obsessively starts drawing a circle, and the camera continuously twists to keep the pen in one position on the screen while the world moves around it.) Most effective, though, is one subtle piece of manipulation. When Suichi’s mom looks up at her husband’s funeral and sees the smoke rising from the crematorium in a great spiral, we see her at the bottom left of the screen as she places a hand on either side of her head and screams. Simultaneously, the lens warps, stretching and inflating her eyes slightly in synch with the shriek. It sounds a little silly in retrospect, but it’s effective as all get out, and gave me an honest-to-God chill the first time I saw it.
So what’s going on? What does it all mean? I mean, they tell us in the end, right? The uzumaki theme is affecting everyone....why?
Dunno. The end of the film is as inexplicable as the rest of it. The spiral just seems to get into everyone and everything. At some point, something snaps and the rules of reality are suspended, with all things bending to the uzumaki, but it’s not exactly as though there’s an intelligence behind it. It’s more like the entire town is slowly being poisoned on an existential level.
Of course, I have my own explanation, such as it is. The uzumaki is a poisonous meme.
Damn, but that’s clever.
Fits, doesn’t it? An idea that gets into people. A “viral” idea that doesn’t really have a genesis, intelligence, or purpose, but something that you encounter and then begin seeing it reflected everywhere around you. Except it’s not exactly an idea...it’s like an incarnate theme warping the film itself, for it to affect even people never exposed to it. Something sunken into the popular unconscious. Almost as if you, in reality, started noticing some reoccurring theme in the world around you...as though you were in a highly symbolic film, and had no way of avoiding it. Of course, once the meme has built up enough momentum, it begins to affect reality through people’s minds....and to be reflected in people. Causes deaths and suicides, and distortions of reality. The end of the film is a photo-album-like summary of the ends of each person affected by the uzumaki. They become twisted and drained, destroyed by the meme. Even the form of the spiral aids in this interpretation, it’s very shape symbolically boring into your brain.
But to assert that I really understand this whole thrust of the film, and that it could be summarized so simply, would be only a half-truth. It’s possible that completely “groking” the central concept is beyond my reach because of the cultural disconnect, not having grown up Japanese, but I don’t really mind the resulting confusion. I really rather enjoy confrontations with such themes and ideas so totally alien to me. There’s significant signals throughout the film that there’s a lot more at work here than just a “poisonous meme”. Halfway through we meet a journalist who’s become interested in the uzumaki-themed deaths and accidents around town, and he treks off to look up the history of the town. Unfortunately, this brings up the only real problem I have with my copy of the film. He goes through a lot of microfiche that presumably hints at the reason for the Uzumaki, but it’s all in Japanese and wasn’t translated as it didn’t work its way into the dialogue. Indeed, the reporter is killed before he can impart any of the knowledge gained.
Even the thematic interpretation of the spiral is completely nebulous, explored in multiple directions at once. The Kodachi-like character sees it as a continuous spiral to the center of attention for her. She plainly desires (stated needlessly bluntly) to be at the very center of the spiral with the rest of the school moving around her. For the “slow” students who are morphing slowly into gigantic snails, the spiral is the inexorable trek inward, becoming more introverted and turned inward. (There’s a way to apply this to their physical slowness....but it’s sitting just out of my reach.) Then there’s the spiral into madness of Shuichi’s father and mother (the mother’s case especially symbolized by the millipede that tries to crawl in here ear), the eventual twisting of Shuichi by the uzumaki through the influence of his parents, transforming him from guardian angel to hideous devil, or there’s the spiral of sickness towards death......with a little work you could apply any of a dozen interpretations to the uzumakis in the film. Anything that becomes an asymptotic approach to the center, always getting minutely closer but never quite reaching it, would fit the theme. The movie itself fits this nicely, as it always seems to be getting closer and closer to some central meaning, but doesn’t.....quite......get within reach. (The film has no real ending as you’d consider it, in that nothing is completely revealed.)
And then, above and within it all, is a feeling that this somehow has something to do with the town. That this uzumaki has permeated the entire town, or that the town brought it about somehow, a slow spiral downward into some unimagined hell. The few pages of manga I did read looked at how the town, in later stages (beyond what’s in the film) began to warp its layout into a giant spiral, while the inhabitants became strange creatures, all twisted and wound together into solid blocks within the homes. The reporter’s researches all had something to do with the town’s past. Several times, the characters contemplate fleeing the city to get away from whatever’s going on, as though that would release them from the sequence.
All in all, this is an excellent, moody, artsy piece. It’s got the key elements of everything I’ve seen pure Japanese horror do extremely well. Yes, it’s got a couple of chills and shocks, but more profoundly it has this air of hopelessness that just permeates the entire film, getting stronger and stronger as the film progresses. (Reminded me strongly of “The Ring”....or rather the Japanese elements of the version I saw.) Then there’s the feeling of something just out of reach...some concept, meaning, or viewpoint that we can’t quite grasp that would allow us to catch up and understand what’s happening, but is never given to us. Someone else knows something essential, tapped into whatever this viewpoint is, and the resulting insight made them kill themselves, or do something equally inexplicable that also put them beyond our grip. (Reminded me of “The Delicate Art of the Rifle”....but that’s pretty obscure.) And finally, there’s this deeply organic feel to the horror. Not gore, exactly, (though there is some of that) but a twisting and warping and rending of a visceral, slimy nature. Even worse, the gristle-like wet crackling heard when this is happening off-screen. Distending of people into things they shouldn’t be, hideous death as a tribute of love.
The only real flaw of the film would have to be the utter absurdity of some concepts. If you don’t at least partially buy into the ideas, a lot of what happens isn’t only confusing, it’s funny in the “totally random” manner. Students turning into snails? Hall-filing hair curls? HA! This only becomes more emphasized later, as the uzumaki starts taking over and becomes more of an incarnate symbol. Everyone’s responses start getting odder and more “artsy”, further away from how actual people would act. (The real reaction upon encountering a 6-foot-long snail would not be “how cute” but “holy SHIT! A SIX FOOT SNAIL!”)
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It must be skinless Friday
2004-05-11 23:28:02
Over Friday night, during the weekly (damn that incompetent hospital worker) experiment I went through some of my old posts. The ones from back when I was just posting in the AMV.org journal function. They were actually pretty good, even in retrospect, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I was a lot better at this before I really cared, and just nattered around for an hour or so with bits and pieces of my day. I really need to stop trying to be profound. It mostly just results in me pouring painful effort into something that I end up deleting anyway or never get all the way through. I should stick with the flippant pop culture. It’s what I’m good at. (Also, I noticed that I’ve repeated myself on at least one occasion. Gah. Someone tell me when I do that.)
So, something of a sleepless weekend this time around. Plans are plans, and reality rarely honors them. I’d intended to find myself some time on Friday and Saturday afternoon to go out shopping for Mother’s day (I never know what to get her), but all the other plans shifted just slightly and filled up all my available time.
First, I’d intended to run the weekly experiment on Thursday, which meant getting up sometime around 2:00 PM on Friday, with plenty of leeway for shopping and enough time to get out and run the CoC game for my friends out in Winder.
Din’ happen.
The hospital worker in charge of approving the proceedings of all human test subject work, and whom all the paperwork and permission slips have to go through was “just in so many meetings” on Thursday that she couldn’t find the time out to walk up to the third floor, pick up a plastic bag, and take it down to the first floor. So all the available blood samples got thrown out. Dammit. The procedure gets transferred to Friday. Meaning that I have to cancel the game on my friends at the last minute (literally, we finally got word as I was on my way out the door on Friday) after they’d already driven the 40-60 miles from work out to the house where we game, for the second time in two weeks. They’re all understanding and just made a movie night out if it, but if no one else, _I_ was disappointed. To just add to the fun, Friday was the day that I had to pick up the sickle mice.
OK, all of you out there with moral objections to the use of live animals in laboratory experiments can commence peering down upon me from on-high in your ivory towers. I have now officially participated in experiments that resulted in the sacrifice (death) of experimental animals. You’re welcome to your qualms. Me, I’m trying to help people.
It’s actually pretty cool. See, after decades of trying, we finally have a half-way competent model for sickle cell anemia. Millions of dollars spent into genetic engineering, and they finally managed to give sickle cell anemia to a mouse.
Why?
Because the primary pathologic problems of sickle cell anemia are A) anemia (duh) and B) vaso-occlusion. Something happens in the patient microcirculation that causes the vessels to clog up. The pain is _excruciating_, and forces doctors to break out the heavy, dangerous guns just to alleviate the pain (straight morphine shots). The “pain crises” come and go largely as they please, and pain just becomes a fact of life for the patient. Worse, however, is the oxygen starvation damage the vaso-occlusion does to the patient’s organs. Progressive damage to the organs over the years is what eventually leads to many patient’s death. Problem is, we don’t know what causes them. Oh, there are plenty of theories, but it can’t be simulated very well in-vitro without making a lot of assumptions, and needs to be seen in-vivo.
Seeing the microvasculature in-vivo with human patients is absurdly difficult. There’s only three places in most mammals where you can observe the capillary system without a full dissection that would kill the patient halfway through, or interrupt the blood flow. A) Nailfold capillaries. Shine a laser beam through your fingernail, and you can actually resolve individual red cells as they go by. Resolution’s horrible, though, and not very helpful. B) Retinal capillaries. Tricky to observe, and again not very helpful, because it’s the wrong kind of capillary. These two help in wholesale generalization about the microvasculature, and help in the working-out-of-details aspect, but get us closer to real treatment only by the tiniest of steps.
The third is a little more helpful. C) Cremaster muscle excision. Anyone who really wants to know what the cremaster muscle is, are welcome to google it. Guys may want to stay out, though. The cremaster is exceptional in that it’s a single layer of muscular tissue. On an experimental animal (mouse, rat, etc.), a little snip of some connective tissue, and the whole thing can be unfolded out and pinned down, making a surface area of a little more than a square inch, and only a single layer of vasculature, still operating pumping blood through all the crevices of the capillary system. You could never do this with a human subject. Largely because it won’t go back in after you’ve unfolded it. (The animal is sedated into unconsciousness during the procedure and experiment, then sedated to death at the end.) Nonetheless, these really aren’t all that helpful. Sickle cell anemia is a full-body disorder. The damage is widespread and multi-organed, as are, apparently, the causes for pain crisis, whatever they may be.
The disease is genetic, and all the problems come from the bone marrow. (I’ll only cover the treatments if someone’s really interested.) This is both good and bad. The genetic aspect of the disorder is really simple, as these things go. A single amino-acid substitution causes everything, but the effects, being on a genetic level and inherent in the hematopoetic (blood-making) stem cells of the bone marrow, hit every system in the body. Being a genetic bone disorder, it’s also ridiculously difficult to fight without killing the patient accidentally or subjecting them to the nastiest of the chemotherapeutic drugs. (Chemo is nasty for more reasons than you’d imagine. There’s no alternative in the bad cancers and some disorders, so it’s the best there is, but that doesn’t make the side effects any nicer. A friend of mine who had to have a bone marrow transplant underwent bone marrow ablation prior to the transplant, and afterwards her tear-ducts shut down permanently. Beats being dead, though.) Thus, treatment is preferable to transplant, but since we don’t know what we’re dealing with on the causative side, how can treatments be formulated? Experimental animals.
So the creation of an animal model is theoretically fairly simple. Just a mimicked substitution in the genetic material of a black-6 mouse, and we’re ready to go, right? Well, that’s what the public thinks. And, as with most things having to do with actual science progress, the public is wrong. They’ve tried to do this ever since genetic alteration became standard enough for repeatable results. Being one of the simplest genetic disorders on record, SSanemia was right out there at the front of the line. Still took them this long to get it right, though. The alteration didn’t take. Or they got chimeric mice (“chimeric models” express both the genetics they inherited and those that were implanted scientifically.....so a genetic “beast with two different heads”) which were just another baby-step....useful only as a “maybe this piece here is relevant” model. Lastly they had a hell of a problem getting the mice to survive childbirth.....and those that survived died during their own pregnancy. Turned out to be a difference in the hemoglobin-switching from fetal to “normal” right after birth....which meant insertion for another, alternate hemoglobin factor. I think it was Isaac Asimov who once wrote that “Scientific discovery rarely ever occurs with a declaration of ‘Eureka!’ but rather with a ‘huh....that’s funny.’” To add my own caveat, scientific progress rarely occurs with a declaration of “Eureka” but rather with a “god damn it, THAT’S what was wrong....”
So, a few years ago, we (the community....I WISH I was smart enough to be a part of that project) finally got a “sickle mouse model” for sickle cell anemia. This really is a massive leap forward, as it opens the field to the thousands of experiments that past scientists have considered over and over again, with the words “if we did that it would tell us a lot about what’s going on inside the patient.....but the patient would also keel over three steps from the door.” Our work? I’m not gonna tell you what it was that we did, because there is the tiniest possibility that someone may google the net for “experiments + sickle cell anemia + mice” occasionally and take off from a concept I established, then rush to publication. Hey, it happens. Not to me, but publication in science can be cutthroat. First outta the gate is always top consideration for the next grants. The rest of us that go through and do all the good work with the appropriate controls get shit for credit.
At any rate, the work thus far involves sacrifice of several sickle and control mice. I went over to the lab at Emory to pick up the samples I was scheduled to work with at 9:30, like I’d been told, and discovered that they’d been told 10:00. No problem, I hadn’t wandered my alma mater in a while and went out a-tromping. Apparently caught everyone the day before graduation because A) practically no one around and B) thousands of chairs lined up on the quad. Came back at 10:00 to find they’d just started working on the mice. Left till 11:30. Did some major tromping, walked all over campus. Discovered once again that it is nearly impossible to eat on campus when you’re on an off-day. Student center food closed, Cap Joe’s closed, only place open was the horrible Cox, where I got a croissant and a chocolate croissant (the latter of which I couldn’t eat more than four bites of, tasted like at least a half-a-package of toll-house in there, all in one big lump), and then went down to the Emory “nature path.”
This one is a little odd to anyone who hasn’t been to Emory. Probably unknown to most of the people there too, since I think they took down the sign. Emory’s landscaping is kinda hilly, and is interrupted mid-campus by min-ravines running between buildings and along walkways, leaving little cloistered ditches of nature preserves here and there about 80 feet across, usually with streams or steam-tunnel outlets draining along them. In one of the more sequestered ones, someone made a “nature path” apparently as part of a PhD thesis. The path consists of a raised walkway made sequentially out of metal sheets, wooden planks, and cement stairs, all raised about a foot or foot and a half above the surrounding beds of ivy and saplings. (The saplings never get very big, as the big trees form a fairly dense canopy above.) Odd thing is, it’s only about six inches wide at its widest point. Hidden little curiosity across from the church school. Works fairly well, too, as nature gets in and around the path instead of being trampled by errant feet. On the other hand, nature gets so close that spiders end up building webs across it, leading to surprised staggering around and tumbling down the hill for both species.
Anyway, the upshot is I spent the whole time walking back and forth across campus to check on their progress. I finally got to leave at noon (jeez!) then later got the word about the sample from the hospital. Put me in a really crabby, depressed mood, and all sweaty from the wandering around in the sun, and stuck with me well into the night. Round about 3:00 AM, though, it occurred to me that I really shouldn’t be such a crab about it. I was sitting in a lab running experiments with blood from transgenic animals. Honestly, I should think that was pretty cool, if only for the fact that I could _say_ that now. I know a lot of my friends would think it pretty neat if they could say something like that.
Rest of the weekend, though, was just exhausting. In bed by 6:00, up by 9:00 so I could go help Sheryl move to her new house. Only some heavy lifting, but really awkward heavy lifting (piano, fridge, and a couple of dressers up the stairs). Only pulled a muscle in my left arm that’s aching a little, which is probably appropriate because I kept finding myself on the non-lode-bearing side of all the lifting. I’m sure everyone else is a lot sorer than I am. (Sorry about the mark on the door Sheryl) Drank about three quarts of Pepsi and water by the time we finished (HOT in that truck), and then tore off to the AWA staff meeting, which we arrived just in time for the end of. Sorted out some stuff with Patrick which should mean I can FINALLY get to work on this year’s plans, then, it being 6:00 on a Saturday, I hadn’t enough time to properly shop for Mother, called to pre-emtively apologize, and tore off to Winder for gaming with friends. (Different game.)
Got home at 2:00, in bed by 3:00. Up by 9:00 again to get out to church in time. So, mostly a sleepless weekend. Crashed out at home for a few hours after church until my head stopped throbbing (and my arm started up....slept on the arm that I’d pulled). Everything after was pretty humdrum, leaving me with about four hours of _actual_ weekend to enjoy.
So, trusting in the rave, if exceedingly brief, reviews from my friends on lj, I went out to see Van Helsing.
Whooo...
Awkward position I find myself in. Appropriately primed by my friends, I enjoyed the hell out of the flick. Now I come back and browse along the friend’s list, and I find ferret busily eviscerating the movie with untoward glee, pointing out plot hole and concept flaws right and left, and granting it companionship alongside “Batman and Robin” in quality.
BATMAN AND ROBIN for God’s sake. The worst of the worst. Worse than LXG. Worse than Highlander II. There are crests and valleys to the enjoyable “badness factor” of flicks, and a lot of them depend on personal preference. At the highest point you have true greats, unsurpassable films. Then there’s a linear drop-off until you plateau somewhere around “competent but flawed”, and then start climing again towards “hideously, laughably bad” and peak out at “camp”. Then you drop out again down the whole progression of B-through-Z flicks, past anything (except Cannibal the musical) made by Troma, and bottom out at the worst of all worlds, the boring movie.
Ferrett plainly believes that this film dwells somewhere around “camp”. But I enjoyed the hell out of it, and I _HATE_ camp. Well, most of the time. I didn’t even really think that the flick was fundamentally flawed, until I started reading his post. You know what? He’s right. There are inexcusably huge holes in this story. Thinking hard, I have trouble coming up with more fundamentally flawed stories outside of the US Godzilla. And yet, I didn’t care. I volunteered to go see it again since I punked out on a friend that couldn’t make it on Sunday. I laughed uproariously throughout at the appropriate moments and gave out a “Fuck YEAH” at the conclusion.
So me liking bad movies is a surprise? Hardly, but, see, I didn’t really consider it a bad movie while I was watching it. Which, naturally, wounds my pride. After a good deal of puzzling, I think I’ve figured out what exactly happened. I went to the flick expecting it to be an entirely hollow film. No great depth, no great chills or drama, and filled up entirely with style. And that’s effectively what I got. An action flick with a style I like. I didn’t bother poking holes in the story because I wasn’t even paying attention to it. I was watching Count Dracula thaw out of his crypt, the Frankenstein Monster’s head split open, Igor quip cleverly, and the Wolfman tear the hell out of anything available. I was watching pastiches of self-conscious revisitations of classic monster movies. The flick isn’t a parody, and it’s not camp. It’s just fun that doesn’t concern itself too much with details like coherent story. Much like Jason vs. Freddy or the Godzilla flicks, it’s an eight year old smacking his action figures together, trying to decide if the Mummy could beat the Creature from the Black Lagoon in a fight.
Quick aside before reaching the review proper. At the theater I saw the preview for “The Chronicles of Riddic” again, and it’s been significantly extended. Every time I see this ad, the feeling that we’re seeing a live-action Heavy Metal comic is drilled further and further home. Could be great, if not very intelligent. Also found myself in the middle of a theater of people who were actually laughing at all the jokes in the “White Chicks” preview, but couldn’t feel superior because I was laughing at the ad for “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.” (Whoa, this might be the first real pot-head movie since Cheech and Chong stopped making them.)
Anyway, Van Helsing! Begin with a black-and-white recreation of the classing ending of Frankenstein. “It’s alive”, burning windmill, angry mob, the whole nine yards, but this time, something new has been added. This project was funded by the undead! The great count requires the work of Frankenstein for his own nefarious purposes, and now that the project is complete, Frankenstein has outlived his usefulness. While the angry mob (led by Rifraf from Rocky Horror) batters down the front doors of Castle Frankenstein (a wonderful set-piece), Dracula murders Frankenstein with a flair of melodrama so overblown it passed into the sublime. That pretty much typifies the performance of Richard Roxburgh throughout the film....a melodramatic flair so wonderfully over-acted that I could draw parallels directly to Casanova Frankenstein from Mystery Men. (A melodramatic flair that FAILED UTTERLY to evoke anything other than rising gorge in his previous attempt as Moriarty in the spectacular failure that was League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.)
Anyway, at Frankenstein’s death, the monster goes berserk and disables Dracula long enough to get himself trapped in a burning windmill, presume ably destroyed in the fire.
The feel of the flick here requires special mention. It does evoke the classic films very strongly, but it’s as though someone cleaned all the grit off the lens and director, and let us see those blurry old sets and minuta clearly for the first time, revealing the somewhat silly melodrama of it all, a kind of half-wink from the actors, like the snide betrayal of Igor, or the absurdly rickety nature of the windmill, or the sadistic sneer of the undertaker.
At any rate, we quickly leave the self-aware horror flick behind, and delve directly into the action-flick-with-horror-supporting-cast film that occupies us for the rest of the film. Van Helsing, our hero Wolverine, is in the Cathedral at Notre Dame tracking down the despicable Mr. Hyde, who, inexplicably, is played by a repainted, brachiating Shrek with a different voice. He’s also apparently taken the LXG (comic) interpretation of the character, as Hyde has become physically enormous, aping the stature of the hunchback whose apartment he’s ended up squatting in. Van Helsing takes a beating at his gorilla-like ham fists, which, by all rights, should have broken him into a thousand pieces, but turns the tide and ends with a triumphant “splat”. The CGI really are beautiful in the action sequences, and make for an exciting slam-bam rapid-fire fight between all the classic beasties that’s like a roller-coaster ride on several levels. Every beastie, save one, has an uncanny ability to climb walls or ricochet around the room like a loosed pinball....or just skip the climbing entirely through the employ of wings.
Anyway, after the somewhat abrupt end to Van Helsing’s pursuit of Hyde, he returns to his employers, the Vatican! Slowly the formula comes together. Indy’s attitude and attire (minus the bruises), Hellboy’s motivation and mysterious past, and James Bond’s friends. A secret laboratory beneath the Vatican houses the Catholic Church’s very own “Q” toyhouse, with its minder, a Friar named Carl, who has mastered monster killing technology like the repeat crossbow, the gatling gun, and the pump shotgun. (Ah, I see the weapon of antiquity used in the holy crusade against zombies!) Carl, much to his consternation, gets drafted into going out on fieldwork to help Helsing in his latest mission....naturally to hunt down Dracula.
There. That’s all the background you need.
Oh yeah, there’s the pair of siblings devoted to the destruction of Dracula, one of whom is a leather-corseted (how the HELL does she do backflips in that thing?) love interest and all-around firebrand on their side, as well as a handful of enemy menaces in the form of three vampiric wives, a couple of Werewolves, and several thousand flying vampiric fetuses, but its all pretty obvious as far as motivation from there on out.
The woman is all damsel-in-distress and finally gets herself a token kill near the end, Carl, for being a friar, provides some fairly funny comedic relief (along with a few well-placed lines from Igor), Helsing goes with all the noble sacrifice that doesn’t quite work out how it was imagined, Dracula and all of his relations chew up the scenery with CGI-distended jaws and six-inch fangs, and the Monster puts in the entirely expected appearance, although being acted by an actual person in a costume made him look a bit the fumbly stumble-bum when fighting with the frantic, hyperkinetic flailing of the CGI vampires in flight and the scrabbling, slathering rage of the Werewolves. Dracula’s wives, if anything, are even more over-the-top than he is, dressed to the nines in colored-veil harem outfits, that is, other than when the movie somehow gets away with displaying them full-frontal as caul-white membranous-winged nudists flapping around the Transylvanian village. (Apparently smoothing over the details and “Barbie”ing them is sufficiently de-humanizing them that they don’t count as “nude”.)
The werewolf transformations were by far the best original sequences in the film. Instead of the standard old stretch-and-distort, grow hair and claws sequence we’re used to, in perhaps the most over-the top scene of the entire film, the love-interest’s brother claws himself backwards UP THE WALL, where, mysteriously suspended 90 degrees from the direction of gravity, he undergoes the transformation to werewolf by tearing and splitting open his own skin, revealing the beast that lurks inside. Actually, that’s a good summary for the entire attitude of the film. Cool, earnest, but actually pretty silly.
Problems?
Yeah, dozens. Even if we ignore the textual stuff (Castle Frankenstein is not in Transylvania) or the anachronistic stuff (the hypodermic needle was invented in 1853), there’s enormous problems with even the film’s internal logic in places (why was Igor in the graveyard). And yet, in other places, there’s remarkable attention to detail. (Check the rope-burns on Igor’s neck, and the homage to the original story when Dracula imprisons Frankenstein in a block of ice.) There’s even full homage to the originals scattered about, like Sidomak’s legendary dialogue from the 1941 “The Wolf Man”
Even a man who is pure of heart
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.
(Two other lines were added here in the movie...can anyone tell me what they are? I missed them.)
Dracula’s central plot is actually pretty clever, although I don’t want to think exactly where all those egg sacs came from.....that’s a lotta shed uterine lining. (Ewwwww.) Absinthe is stuck in there completely randomly, and by the way they drink it straight I could tell that the writers have never actually tried absinthe. Besides, swigging a hallucinogen right before going off to fight monsters is a really bad idea. Rule #24 for being a cultist: Never mix summonings and hallucinogens. When the shit hits the fan you really need to know which unspeakable vision will go away with the invocation of an Elder Sign, and which will go away with a hot bath and some B-vitamin complex.
Other things to notice is the cool back-front contortionist at the Count’s celebration (sorry, I just thought that was neat. The celebration in its entirety was a rather neat encapsulation of the hedonistic stylings of the undead....and gives me some ideas for my CoC game. I think the ballroom scene is the “Fearless Vampire Hunters” reference that Brotherripparius was talking about), one of Dracula’s wives pulling a Blade II reference, and Carl finding key pieces of information in antique Mad magazine fold-ins. Hell the film killed off monsters by shooting vampires and staking werewolves! That had to be a conscious turnaround.
And, of course, there’s the climactic battle where we finally get the ending _I’ve_ wanted for years. Fuck yeah! The old corpse couldn’t stand a chance against a fully raging lycanthrope!
There are a few apparently inexplicable points that do deserve special attention. The “werewolf cure” sequence is badly distorted in retrospect unless you take a few lines at less than literal value. (Spoilers) Gabriel has been infected by the lycanthrope’s bite. They know where the lycanthropy cure is, but Gabriel needs to kill Dracula as a werewolf before he can be cured. (Only way the old undead bastard can finally bite it.) Gabriel will fully turn into the Werewolf at the final stroke of midnight on his first full moon. After which, Gabriel says that he’ll “permanently be a Werewolf”.
What, precisely, is meant by that? Well, they’ve warped the legend quite a lot here. Apparently the original wolfman was “permanently a Werewolf” because he’d lived past several full moons at that point. He couldn’t change back to a human form, even in broad daylight. That’s how they could hunt him in the day. The brother was still working on the first night of his transformation when he attacked his sister. Because he wasn’t “permanently a Werewolf” yet, he would change to the monster and back when the moon went behind a cloud. Had he lived longer, he would have lost all control and permanently become the monster. Gabriel, when he was infected, was using this 4-hour stretch to his advantage, willing himself to become the slathering beast early in order to combat Dracula. (Couldn’t do it before midnight because they were late getting there, and were only counting on finding Drac when Drac’s plan went into fruition at midnight.) Now, it’s possible that the cure would work on any Werewolf who was already “permanently” a Werewolf, but they’d planned to administer the cure in the last seconds before midnight because Gabriel should have been able to control himself enough to either change back or not attack the person giving the dose. After midnight, the beast would do its level best to tear the head off the well-meaning friend and eat his entrails. Does that answer all the problems with that sequence? (Really, did I miss something?)
Next, what is Gabriel’s backstory? Personally, I love that they left it up in the air like that, but since a lot of people require all loose ends to be tied up lest they be forced to think for themselves, we’ve got a couple of clues. A) Gabriel remembers the Jewish massacre at Masada. Which means he’s immortal, or very nearly so, and has been around a hell of a long time. B) When he killed Dracula the first time, the legends refer to him as “the Left Hand of God.” This is a little more complex, but gives us three possibilities.
1) The left hand of God is the hand associated with “smiting,” purging and punishing the earth through war and disaster. This would make Gabriel some kind of avatar of God.
2) The angel Gabriel is the messenger of God and sits at God’s left hand. (Most texts say that Jesus sits at his right.) This would make Gabriel.....Gabriel the angel. There’s an odd concept for an American action film.
3) Then again....Gabriel didn’t always sit at the left hand of God. There was someone else there before him. But he had an accident. You might’ve read about it. People say he fell, but he opines that he was pushed. Hellboy indeed.
Finally, why’d Anna die at Gabriel’s hands when she’d withstood batterings more severe from everyone else? Well, the easy answer is that the batterings _weren’t_ worse. She, like Gabriel, got knocked around quite a lot, but nothing else ever really got a hold of her. Gabriel may have actually passed beyond the pale before he grabbed her in that lunge, and just snapped her spine. It’s not like she was supposed to be possessed of superhuman strength or resilience, just absurd levels of acrobatics (in a stiff corset no less).
So, anyway, I unabashedly liked this film, despite its sillyness and its flaws. But I say that it’s not camp (or, not what I consider camp), and I honestly didn’t like it _because_ of its flaws, so what gives?
Well, actually, I’ve thought of two other films that have a similar manner of appeal as this one. Van Helsing is like an action film made by crossing the old “Monster Squad” film with “Buckaroo Banzai.” Neither is exactly camp, nor do they expect to be taken entirely seriously. They’re just fun. Admittedly, they aren’t nearly as fundamentally flawed in construction as Van Helsing, but they’re still cut from the same cloth.
I really wouldn’t mind seeing the flick again, but this time around I actually had a complete stranger sitting next to me who just couldn’t keep from giving a running commentary. Gahd. “It’s a Lycan!” “He started it but he finished it too, five hundred years later!” “Ohh, that’s scary!” She apologized after, but still....
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Beat This
2004-04-28 01:20:54
So, for quite a while now, I’ve been telling my friends that “things are bad.” I never went into any details, just the pretty straightforward “things are bad” and left it at that. I think at least a couple have sensed that things were coming to a head, and would likely go in one extreme direction or another, as the last few posts, despite being bouts of harried self-indulgent crap and whining, have been getting more and more comments.
Well, I’m writing everyone now to tell you that things are no longer bad.
No, they’re not worse or horrific or any other clever turn of phrase. They’re actually better. Or, to be more accurate, the bad has passed.
This is a very good thing. The bad that’d been piling up had made me turn inward into a dark, shriveled thing full of malice, venom, and self loathing. Half a dozen times in the last month I’ve contemplated starting out a post with the phrase “Can anyone really tell me how to tell when you’ve become manic depressive? I’m considering medication. Seems like everyone I know is medicated, and they all look like they’re doing a lot better than I am.”
Actually, jury’s still out on that one. I’m in the long, slow process towards decompression. I thought it’d all blown out with no negative long-term damage, but I happened upon the “controversy” meme running around, and when I went to fill it out with my answers, I kept finding myself starting every category with the phrase “OK, you fuckwits....” in which I was directly addressing people I know and respect. (Or would respect, were I in my right mind right now.) So, I think I’ll leave that particular meme alone for a while, and come back to it later.
Much later.
Instead I will tell you a story. A funny story about my misfortune. No, really, it’s effin’ hilarious. But it is long. REALLY long.
See, the thing that’s been hanging over my head was a major, MAJOR meeting with my committee. Major, like determine the rest of my career=life major. Major, like “see this coming 18 months ago......and overdue by about 6 months” major. The meeting was Monday, and went OK.....but the windup’s the funny part.
So I’ve got the work sent off to everyone two days late. I got the scramble ‘round to get the paperwork signed, and it’s all good. All that’s left is reserving the actual room for Monday, 12-2:00.
Problem: One of the committee members is not actually in Atlanta. About a year ago, he got a job at Drexel university in Pennsylvania. This is, however, OK. He still wants to be on the committee, it just means that all the meetings have to be teleconferenced. So I need to get one of a couple of special “distance learning rooms” reserved for our meeting.
The meeting is Monday. Very importantly, my advisor left the country for a conference on Tuesday, and won’t be back until Sunday. On Wednesday I go one building over from where I work (IBB building) to the Biomedical Engineering building (BME). I do a bit of poking around, and I find the person responsible for reserving rooms in the building. There are many people in this story, and I can remember the names of only a couple of them. They are, however, all encountered in a long sequence, so I’ll just use an easy placeholder for them all. This woman, the person in charge of reserving rooms in the BME will heretofore be known as person “A”. So I go into her office.
Me: “Hello, are you in charge of reserving rooms in this building for meetings?”
A: “Oh....ummmmm.......yeah. Yeah, I do that.”
Me: “Could you reserve the lecture room 1103 for me on next Monday from 12-2:00?”
A: “Ahhhhhh........ohhhhhhh.........hmmmmmmmmm.........let me see.” Fiddles around on computer for ten minutes. “I’ll have to check on that......I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
Me: “OK, I’ll see you then.”
I then go back to my work and telephone Drexel U. Or I try to. I fumble about on the lab phones for an hour or so, unable to get any of the calls to go through. I get our secretary, Trudy, to come in and try. She is similarly perplexed. Then I go to Rudy (out of sequence, recurring character, front office secretary). “Rudy, I need to make some out of state phone calls, and I can’t seem to do it from the lab.”
“Oh, that’s because long distance is turned off for the rest of the building.”
“Huh? We used to be able to make long distance phone calls!”
“Yeah, you were never supposed to. We got in a lot of trouble from the budget department. During the computer changeover, the lines had to be turned on briefly, and some didn’t get turned off again. We fixed that last weekend.”
So, to make any out-of-state, non 1-800 phone calls, I now have to go to our wing office and bug the secretary into using her phone. I do so, and get through to Drexel computer help desk. Of course, that’s the wrong place to call, but it was the only number I could get from the web, and I figured they’d know where to direct me.
They do, and toss me a different phone number, calling person B.
Person B does not pick up. I call back the help desk.
“Oh, he’s got today off. Don’t worry, he’ll be back tomorrow. Just leave him a message.”
Errr......better than nothing. I leave an extensive, detailed message. Then go back to my lab and get some more work done on SOUL SUCKING PRESENTATION.
THURSDAY
Been up half the night with revisions, so come in a little bleary-eyed. I go over to BME to see if person A confirmed my reservation.
A’s door is closed. There is a piece of paper taped to it. It says “Gone to Emory, won’t be back today.”
Huh.
OK......
Huh.
Go back to work, wait half the day for a phone call that never comes. Shove secretary aside, and use her phone again to call person B at Drexel. Person B is not there. Call help desk. “Oh, don’t worry, he’ll be in later today.” Being uncertain about the reliability of this person, I also filled out an online form and sent it into the deep places of the web, requesting help in managing the room for a teleconference, and hoping to get a tech to come out the day-of to be sure nothing broke down.
Needless to say, he never came in or called me. I was tied to our phone the whole fucking day waiting for him to call me, a condition made even more idiotic by the fact that our lab phone has a battery life of literally 2 minutes (because some FUCKER WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS left it off the hook for three days and obliterated the battery memory). On the other hand, more concentrated work on the PRESENTATION FROM HELL.
Friday, the day it got good. I come in and go straight to A. She is, thank you Lord, in today.
Me: “Hi”
A: “Ohhh.....hmmmm....”
Me: “Did you manage to confirm that room reservation for me?”
A: “Ohhhhh.......hmmmmmm.......yeah, I meant to do that........hmmmmmmm.......let me see.........hmmmmmm..........I don’t know if........hmmmm.........wait.......” (fiddles weakly on computer for ten minutes) “I’d have to check............the thing is..........oh, we’ll just put you down for it.”
Me: “Uh...is that OK?”
A: “Yeah, it’s probably good.”
Me: “Okayyyyyy....”
So I go back to the lab. Not willing to wait this time, I march off to the secretary to call B. Still no answer. I call back the help desk.
Me: “I’ve been calling this person.”
HD: “OK, who’ve you been calling?”
Me: “B”
HD: “......why were you calling him? He’s on vacation.”
Me: “But they told me to call him about setting up a teleconference.”
HD: “Who told you that? He’s not even the right guy for this. You want C.”
Me: *slap* “Is he there?”
HD: Oh yeah. Here’s his number. He’ll get back to you in a few minutes.
Me: you sure?
HD: Yeah, he’s good about that.
So I call and leave a message. Sure enough, C actually calls me within five minutes. I tell him the bare basics, that I need a room set up on his end for Dr. D, and I have arranged for a room on this end. Then C starts asking all these tech questions that I can’t answer. He especially wants to do a test call today to make sure the system will go through. I, fortunately, anticipated this. Unfortunately, I mostly anticipated this by starting on Wed, so much of the planning is up in smoke, but I still know what to do. I’ll go to the computing center (OIT) and talk to people face-to-face to get the answers this tech guy needs. Maybe even a little assistance. I leave C to set up things on his end, get stuff sorted out, etc. and walk to the other end of campus where OIT is located.
Run into techie E at the front desk. At the mention of videoteleconferencing, he comes out from behind the desk and points me down this long hallway to a pair of double doors. Tells me to ask for person F.
I go knock. Door opens. It’s person G. Ask for person F.
Person F not here today. But fortunately, he’s not the one I really want. For videoteleconferencing, I really wanted H. H is down the hall, up two flights of split-stairs, past the bathroom, around a corner, room 358. I go down the hall, up two flights, past the bathroom, and find room 358.
The door is closed. I knock. No response.
Back past the bathroom, down the stairs, down the hall, bang on door, get G. “H isn’t there” I say. “Oh, well, try person I. He’s in room 356.”
Down the hall up the stairs past the bathroom to room 356.
The door is closed. I knock. No response.
Past the bathroom, down the stairs, down the hall, get G. “I isn’t there either.”
“Was ANYONE there?”
“Yeah, only 356 and 358 were closed.”
“Well, ask one of them.”
“Uh.....OK.”
Down the hall, up the stairs, past the bathroom.
Stand befuddled in the hallway, staring at the hollow plywood doors in confusion. Then it was that the saintly person J, attracted by my constant intrusion into their little cul-de-sac of officespace, comes out into the hallway and asks if she can help me. I explain my dilemma. She responds by banging on 356 and 358 to confirm my story.
Oh, let me stop at this point. I need you to understand how far into the complex I was. I was way, way, WAY back into the OIT structure. Back into the areas where the people who write the actual code, maintain the servers, and generally receive all the mild electric shocks were. The refuge of those incapable of schmoozing. (Other than, naturally, the saintly J.) This was past the public face, which was person E. This is past the techie face you see for things that actually need fixing. That was person G. This is even past the big windowed, recessed rooms where the servers reside and one lonely guy sits in the middle of a wide open room with observation windows looming down on him.
How else to express this.
Let’s put it this way. One of the few people there was a slight little soft-spoken guy with fade-into-the-background thin blond beard who might’ve weighed eighty pounds when soaking wet. On the wall outside his office was a framed photo of himself.
In a fursuit.
Yeah.
Not fuckin’ with ya. Bright red fox. Complete with head.
Anyway, J takes me back to her spartan office, and checks her schedule. Turns out that H was on his “alternate work day.” I was on his vacation. She calls K to find out who’s supposed to be covering for them. K doesn’t know. She calls L. Not in. She calls M to find out who is responsible for maintaining the rooms in BME. M doesn’t know. J starts to get embarrassed. Me sits twiddling my thumbs looking around the room. I spot three very nice frames hung on the wall in the corner with some kind of abstract art in them. They’ve been there a while, as they’re a little dusty. Then I spot that the abstract art is actually the backing, complete with price tags. Empty frames. I scoot a little more into my bolt-for-the-door-if-this-person-comes-at-me-with-something-sharp position.
J calls N. N suggests she call O. J calls O, gets an answering machine with an alternate number. She calls the alternate, and gets O.....at his grandmother’s house. Embarrassed, J asks if O knows who is responsible for the room. O says that N is. O suggests she call P. O guesses at P’s phone number, and gets it almost right. Some more calling around spots which numbers O transposed, and we get P’s cell phone number. P is on his alternate work day, but picks up anyway. P says that no one will be in today, but not to loose hope, there’s one person who we can call who will be sure to help us out with everything.
Person A.
NGGGGGHhhhhnnngggggg......
We call person A. There’s some hemming and hawing, and A agrees to give me a hand, since she at least knows how to dial the system for the call, but we better hurry, she leaves at noon. I pass the number for techie C at Drexel through the phone to her, thank the saintly J, and run back to BME, as I’ve only got 15 minutes before she leaves.
OH BUT WAIT. We’re just getting warmed up.
Me: Hi! Sorry for all the trouble, let’s go down and try the system.
A: “Ohhhh......hmmmmmmm......that’s not necessary.
Me: Sorry?
A: “I called C. It turns out Dr. D isn’t there.”
Me:
Me: WHAT?
A: “He’s not in Pennsylvania. He’s going to be at a conference in Massachusetts on Monday. Apparently he wants to do a telephone-teleconference.
Me: NGGGGGGGHHHhhhhhhhgggg...........
A: “Do you still want that room”
Me: “Geh......yeah, I guess so.”
I go back to the lab. Sure enough, there’s a message there for me from Dr. D, explaining his “confusion” about what was going on. Apparently, he’d always known we were going to have to do a telephone teleconference, and just hadn’t bothered to pass that little piece of information along.
So.....telephone teleconference, right? Step down in technology, right? Easier, right? Welll.....not so sure. Before I call him back, I better make sure I can do the tech stuff on this end. So, I dig out one of the old lab phones and a bit of cord and take it across to room 1103.
Room 1103 has 12 phone jacks in the room. Three of them are in panels under the floor up front, one is nestled behind the computer control panels behind the podium, two are on the front wall, two are on the side walls and four are on the back walls. None of them get a dial tone. Normally, I’d call in the tech person to check on this, and tell me if there was a way of turning one of them on. But the building tech person is person N, or his backup P. (Don’t feel ashamed about going back and checking to keep up. I got them muddled at this point too.) In desperation, I go back and get a different phone. It confirms my results.
But wait! I remember that now I don’t have to videoconference! So I’m not tied to that room! I go back and talk to Rudy about reserving the big conference room in IBB, and whether or not a phone teleconference would work in that room. He thinks it would, since it’s been done before, but we should check. He hauls out an $800 phone and we go in to check it. It WORKS! We find a plug on the second try! It even dials long distance! And this conference room is only 80 feet from room 1103! Can’t reserve the room yet, though, ‘cause the secretary, person Q, is out at lunch. So I run out, grab a bite, and come back.
Now here comes the punchline. Up till now, I just figured that life was hard. At this point I knew that someone up there was just messing with me for yuks.
Me: Hi, this where I reserve conference rooms?
Q: Yes, what do you need?
Me: I need the big conference room reserved for Monday, 12-2:00
Q: Let me check....hmmmm......sorry, can’t do it.
Me: Uh oh. Why?
(Wait for it)
Q: Demolition.
Me: 0_o
Me: WHAT?
Q: Demolition. They’re demolishing the offices next door to that conference room, so we can’t schedule anything in there.
Me: On Monday.
Q: Yeah.
Me: ONLY on Monday?
Q: Yeah.
Me: What about that nice board-member’s room with all the leather chairs and bigscreen TV?
Q: Sorry, Dr. Nerem has that room reserved from 11:00 till 1:00 on Monday.
So, no conference rooms in IBB. Hmmmmm.
So I go into the Environmental sciences building (CHBE), and I go talk to Brenda. Brenda is the secretary of the main grad office for we lowly CHBE students, and another saintly person. She will be referred to as person R merely because I’m getting tired of typing all this. I explain my situation to R, and she cuts straight to the center of the matter in two seconds: “Sounds to me like you need a phone with a fifty foot cord.”
I gape. This is the first useful advice I received all day. R just happens to have a high-quality speakerphone and a fifty-foot phone cord in her desk, which she hands idly over to me. I run off back to 1103. Fifty feet is more than enough to stretch out of the conference room to the nearest block of offices. I get shooed out of one office by person S, and then person T lets me into a spare office near the conference room. There’s a working phone on the desk. It even calls long distance! I take my phone and the bundle of cord, crawl behind the desk, unplug the phone and plug mine into the socket.
No dialtone.
I plug the other phone in. It initializes, and works fine. I try mine again.
No dialtone.
I look at the ends of the cords. The new one is about twice as wide. It looks like an Ethernet cable. But it’s constructed so that a normal phone cord could fit into the socket. I spend a LOT of time fretting over this. I confirm that all the phone lines in 1103 don’t work with this other phone either. (Much later my father suggested this might be some kind of internet-transmit phone line.)
I go back to R. I say “you’re not going to believe this.” Again, R cuts straight to the heart of the matter. “Why don’t you go down and ask person U in the computer lab? He might know something about this. If not, come back up and we’ll reserve you a room here that has a working line, though I bet you want to stay in 1103 so as not to have to give last minute changes to your committee.” That sounds like a great idea. I go down to techie U.
He’s not there. Techie V, who’s just an undergrad and can’t answer my question, tells me that U is stuck in a meeting until 5:00, and won’t be back until then. I go back upstairs. R is gone. W, however, is there, to tell me that R left for the day. I ask about reserving the teleconference room in CHBE. We fumble a bit, and I get the only remaining one. I go down to check the room, but it’s really close to 5:00 and I set my phone down in the lab. I have to check the line. W talks building supervisor X into propping the door for me, and I run to get the phone.
The phone line works! But it doesn’t call long distance. And there’s no computer interface here. And I think you have to stand in the middle of the boardroom table with a 5-foot pole in order to turn the projector on. (Ceiling mounted.)
I say “fuck it”. I go back to the lab and compose a long e-mail to N, requesting help in finding an active phone line (person S, before chasing me off, told me that they had done teleconferences in that room before, just that she didn’t know where they plugged in).
Then I check out the projector and laptop for the weekend (Advisor Y wanted to see me present this on Sunday morning to offer comments and advice), lock them in my desk, and go back to working on the PRESENTATION OF DEATH.
Total damage to day? 7 solid hours.
(One last thing on Friday. We got blood.)
SATURDAY
I get a reply back from N. He tells me my options are different room or contact O, who should be back on Monday. I send a note off to O. Work the entire day on PRESENTATION TO END LIFE.
I work until 3:30.
SUNDAY
I get up at 7:00 to go present for Advisor Y.
He’s late. I never present for him, he just goes over the slides I e-mailed him, and offers a lot of restructuring advice. He wants to see the results at 10:00 on Monday.
However, I tell of my problems. I give a blurry 10-minute version with lots of hand-waving. Dr. Y hears part of it and says “screw this, no teleconference.”
I am relieved. Dr. D is pissed, possibly at me. Dr. Y is pissed at Dr. D, and possibly me. Which, I think, sets a record for angering your committee and encouraging infighting before the presentation even begins.
Nonetheless, I go home and crash for a few hours, then set back to perfecting and cutting down to a reasonable length (unlike this post) the PRESENTATION OF VERY BADNESS until 2:00 AM.
MONDAY
I come in at 7:00, going over and over the work. Ask good friend Z to pick up the food and drink I ordered. I meet Dr. Y. Set up projector and computer. Go over presentation. Some changes made, others commented on, need to do quick later. Meeting runs until 11:15. Rush back to lab. Finish assembling presentation, getting paperwork together, getting photocopies made, take deep breath and walk over to room 1103.
11:45 Open door to 1103.
The room is full. Of students. Taking a final.
Close door to 1103.
Go upstairs to have a heart-to-heart talk with person A.
Me: (paraphrased and reduced to the vernacular) “ ‘THE FUCK???”
A: “Ohhhhh........yeah..........yyyyyyeeeaaaahhhh..........ohhhh.......... I thought this........ohhhh......hmmmm........ nope........ they’ll be done at 3:20.”
Me: “Are there any other rooms I could use?”
A: “Ohhhh.....hmmmm.......lemme check.” (Calls someone. Asks question. Gets put on hold for ten minutes.
Me: *leaves*
Go downstairs. Appeal to the souls of the good people in my home building, the IBB. They, out of the goodness of their hearts, give me a room. The one next to the demolitions.
Everything starts about 5 minutes late, but other than that it goes smoothly. Or as smoothly as I can hope.
And that is why I get chosen to run the VAT. 'Cause in the end, it only caused 5 minutes of disruption.
The rest of what follows is a movie review and related fritterings from a journal post started several days ago that lost it's momentum and died in the middle of the second (not shown) review.
Enjoy.
On a completely different note, I was a little distressed to find out that the many of my friends think that the death of the head of the McDonald’s chain by a heart attack was just the pinnacle of humor. It appears that I’d forgotten a primary rule of society, you see, because once you are rich enough or enough of a public figure, you cease to be a human being, and it is then morally and socially acceptable to point and laugh when you die horribly and painfully. It is similarly humorous that Mitsuteru Yokoyama burned to death in a housefire, because, you see, that means that “Big Fire” finally won out in the end.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
Jesus, people. I may be one of the more insensitive assholes out here, but I try to make it a general policy not to point and laugh when someone actually dies. The guy worked his way up the ladder his whole life and only got the job a year and three months ago. The guy was a benefactor of several MS groups, was an honorary member of the board of trustees of the Chicago chapter National Multiple Sclerosis Society, served for two years as its chairman and was a past president of the International Federation of the Multiple Sclerosis Societies. Plus he served on the board of trustees of Ronald McDonald House Charities. Yeah, obviously the guy deserved it.
Three reviews for you this week (or whenever the hell this all gets finished and I can shuttle it out to you), but first a mini-review. I stopped by the little mini-con we had at Tech a few weeks ago called “Techwoodcon”. By a really random coincidence, I happen to know the person who was running it, and I stopped and talked to him for a good hour or so. He was learning the hard way about trusting people to do the jobs you assign them, and the resultant fallout when they don’t do shit, how equipment will always break down within the first hour of the con, and how just about everything involved in running a convention is like riding an out-of control railroad where you’ve only got track laid about every thirty feet.
That said, it was a free con, one day affair, and they got in about 140 people, despite the complete lack of advertisement. I was only able to stop by at the end due to work, but it was enough time to finally see the Cowboy Bebop movie. The movie was good (not owning a copy I can go over with a fine tooth comb, I’m not gonna give you a review) but it has convinced me that the Japanese are genetically incapable of not completely fucking up Christianity at any given instance. Christianity was involved in two key points, and both were completely fucked beyond recognition. First, a complete misconception as to how Purgatory works (largely mistaken in the movie as one of the Chinese hells), and then “Because Halloween is the day on which a soul in purgatory, if it prays hard enough, can ascend to heaven”. Never mind that it made no sense in the context of the movie, it’s just flat WRONG. I have friends who studied for their doctorate in divinity, and checked with them. This is just MADE UP. Random crap. I’ve gotten really tired of the complete miscomprehension of various esoteric bits of Christianity as they’ve surfaced in anime, and this just adds to the pile. Hell, the best I’ve ever seen it do is in the interminable declaration of anime characters that “God may forgive you, but I never will.” (I understand that the kabalistic beliefs referenced in Evangelion are largely correct, but that’s more Judaic mysticisms than anything having to do with Christianity.)
Jeezum. I expected better from CB. Hate to be disappointed like that. Other than the nonsense, though, it was great fun.
So, what do I have to offer you this time around? Well, I hit something of a wall the other day. I’m not going to go into details, as they’re too fucking depressing, but let’s just say that work is going worse all the time in all the most petty details. I try to make arrangements and preparations, only to discover way WAY after the fact that I’ve gone the long way around on really simple stuff that I’d have known if only I’d asked, and now I’m late to do it the RIGHT way. I’ve gotten really fed up, but not in the angry way, rather in the really depressed “why can’t I keep from fucking this all up” way.
So I went out to catch a movie. I’d intended to see Van Helsing with some friends that night, but we suddenly found out that we were about two weeks off from the actual release date.
Damn.
That left Kill Bill 2 and “The Punisher.”
Some of you may remember my review of the first Kill Bill. While I enjoyed the film, it is so completely not my genre that I have no trouble telling you that this ain’t my bag, man. I’m surrounded by friends who are so much further into the HK scene that I can’t even see them from where I stand on the sidelines.
Problem was, I went with my usual plan, which was “Show up at the NDekalb mall, and see what’s playing.
Well, work got out late, so I show up at the mall at 8:15 and discover that Kill Bill starts at 9:30, and Punisher starts at 10:00.
Bleh.
So I hit the entirely DESERTED arcade, and while away the time by wasting about $10. Played the LoTR pinball game enough times to determine that I really, really suck at pinball. (Didn’t get the replay once.) (OH! OH!! Update! Played the Simpsons pinball at the tech arcade and managed to get TWO replays in ONE game! Kickass!)
Finally, 10:00 rolls around, and I go in to see “The Punisher.” Dinner was an absurdly priced $6 hot-dog and stupid-sized soda, but what else was I gonna eat at that time of night?
Ironically enough, one of the previews was for the upcoming remake of “The Stepford Wives,” a movie I passed on picking up about a week ago.
The Punisher is an odd movie. Much like Daredevil, it pretty much started with the deck stacked against it. Only moreso.
The Punisher was always a rather delicate topic for Marvel. It was about as dark as Marvel ever got, and, aside from the other books dealing with actual daemon summoning and satanic rites aside (Oh, sorry, you didn’t know about those? Pretty laughable, but Marvel used to be a lot more glib about tackling stuff like this in an all-out war of escalation between themselves, DC, and EC......only one I ever got was a really freaky comic called “Night Force.”), the Punisher was probably the only Marvel comic justifying the hullabaloo being kicked up over the immorality of comics. (Just saying that if you had to pick one.....) I think I’ve only ever read two or three comics of the Punisher when I was a kid, and maybe spotted him a few times in crossovers, but I had a friend in grade school back in Indiana for whom the Punisher was his absolute favorite comic. Here’s the twist, though. My friend was a pacifist. The kind of thirteen-year-old pacifist who would just stand there and take it when kids threw dirt clods at him. The kind of pacifist that only a child can be, before the world gets all complicated on you, and brings you issues larger than getting pushed down on the playground. He came by it naturally enough, as his father had been a conscientious objector and then gone to Canada during Vietnam. Which, looking back on it, makes it all the more confusing that he liked this comic in particular.
Anyway, I’m gonna be summarizing broadly, and probably wrongly, as Punisher was even further off my radar than Daredevil was. Originally, Frank Castle was a Vietnam Vet. A “best of the best” kinda guy, hardened by war in the manner of “Apocalypse Now,” and only barely capable of fitting in once he got back. Then, one day, his family gets caught in a gangland crossfire in Central Park, killing his wife and son.
Fank snaps, and becomes the Punisher. That’s really all there is to the story. He’s sort of Marvel’s answer to Batman, only a lot darker, and simultaneously much more shallow. He’s Batman when Batman gets sick of the costumes, sick of the endless rotating wards at Arkham, and looses any problems he’s got with killing.
That sorta makes Frank unique in the Marvel universe. See, he has a moral code set in adamantium. Probably the most frighteningly simple moral code in Marvel. There is right, and there is wrong, and if you choose wrong, you become his problem. Castle lives down among the muck and grime where you can smell the filth of humanity. He doesn’t regularly tangle with any of the costume crowd. He usually ends up with the dealers, the druggies, the pushers, the serial killers, the numbers racket, the gangs, corporate warfare, and the rapists. His rouge’s gallery wasn’t in the spandex crowd, either, but down in the lowlifes and mob connections. His powers?
Lots of guns. And skill. And perhaps the greatest stamina of any character in the MU.
Frank Castle doesn’t care about redemption, he doesn’t care about reforming any of these crooks. Madness is no excuse. All he cares about is killing those who’ve done wrong. A friend told me about one of the storylines from the comic wherein Frank decides to address the drug problem. He starts by blowing up a crackhouse and walking in with a couple of revolvers, shooting survivors in the head, sparing only one in order to trace the connections back up the chain of command. (Eventually ending up in Columbia.) Sorta the embodiment of “kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out” except he has no doubt about what he’s doing, and no one could sway him from his course. He knows what’s right and what’s wrong, and will act accordingly. Doling out punishment. Frightening certainty. The rest of the Marvel heroes refuse to even include him in their ranks, regarding him as little more than a psychopath, albeit a highly skilled one.
So, with a character that stark, it should make it easy to transfer to the screen, right?
Nope.
See, the problem is that we’re hardwired to not accept someone with these characteristics as a hero. We can accept Spiderman’s “with great power comes great responsibility”, and the X-men’s “trying to protect a world that hates and fears them”, but the Punisher just seems like a driven loonie..... enacting a revenge fantasy for his family over and over again. People like that in the movies are supposed to learn how empty such motives are. Hell, that’s been the starting point of villains more than a dozen times now. Plus, he’s kind of the ne plus ultra of the genre. He’s so dark and brooding and so far down in the pit of his own stomach, and so testosterone-laden that he laps himself and becomes comical. He may be the only Marvel character lampooned as a living stereotye as many times as Wolverine. Even Eastman and Laird (TMNT) had a pastiche of the Punisher in the form of a time-traveling rat called “the Fannywhacker.”
So, we’ve got a fine line to walk here. Gotta make the man as dark and brooding as possible without degenerating him into a parody of himself, while simultaneously not falling into the self-serving angsty introspection and heading more in the direction of stoicism as taught by a granite boulder. Not easy. Especially during an origin story, where everything is supposed to be at it’s most heightened.
So how does the director do it? Well........it’s obvious he had an idea here. Lots of backstory. Lots of endearing character development of everyone around Frank. Show the horror and tragedy of the origin story through people able to experience it, so Frank’s stoicism stands out all the more, and the few occasions where he breaks down would thus be increased massively in effect. Really, this was a good idea.
Didn’t work, though.
Similarly, toss a good deal of confusion into the issue by creating a justification for the villain’s actions beyond just “being evil” for which we could almost sympathize. Start blurring the line a bit. Frank can clearly see the justification for what he’s doing, but the audience, from the detached perspective outside of the character’s heads, can see the frightening similarities between hero and villain. Much moreso than the lame speech Green Goblin gave Spiderman in the first film. Call into question the Vigilantism that makes up Frank’s raison de etre, and question whether Frank is still really a good guy or not. This actually worked much better, although still fundamentally flawed.
See, the problem with this film was really that it couldn’t make up its mind what it wanted to be. It samples from two dozen brands of testosterone, but can’t settle on just one, and the result is an uncomfortable dilettantism jumping around from shot to shot. Some occasions he’s too glib. Sometimes he’s saying lines that literally felt like they were lifted from a comic (“Watch the papers every day, and you’ll see me at work.” “What section.” “Obituaries.”) and are just inexcusably stumble-bum in execution. Sometimes he’s Clint Eastwood, sometimes Charles Bronson, sometimes Rambo, and sometimes John Wayne. Fucker can’t stand still.
But where are my manners.....the plot!
Frank’s no longer a Vietnam vet in the movie version. To be so, he’d be too old for the role at this point. Instead, he’s a retired soldier of some undefined wars, retired special ops, retired from a CTU job, and in the process of retiring from undercover police work. Unfortunately, a sting he’s set up to nab some gun runners in the New York harbor goes sour. He, acting as a Eurotrash dealer gets shot in the squibs, just as planned (explosive blood packs to look like getting shot), but a kid who tagged along with his gunrunner friend gets shot up in the ensuing confusion.
Frank pulls himself outta the body bag, thinks nothing of it, and goes off to a family reunion in the Caribbean.
Problem? The kid who died was the son of Howard Saint, a big time money launderer/ corporate magnate / all around bastard played by John Travolta. Surprisingly, Travolta doesn’t completely flub the job. At points, it’s bad, but there are other points where he actually pulls what could be a really stereotypical role out of the mire and does something with it. At the start, we actually feel a bit sorry for the guy. A messenger arrives by limo and walks through the opulent mansion to the back terrace where Mr. and Mrs. Saint are taking in the night air. The messenger says something, Mrs. Saint collapses sobbing, and Mr. Saint rushes to her side. It was actually a remarkably human portrayal.
Of course, the Saints want revenge, and Howard pours money into the works to find out everything he can about the death of his son. (He has another, but, you know, they were a matching set.) Within a day, he knows about Castle, and arranges for Quentin, his right-hand man, to take care of it. Mrs. Saint, however, insists that just killing Frank isn’t enough. She wants his whole family dead, since they’re conveniently gathered together at that moment.
Meanwhile we get a bunch of character development of the Castle family, and then the extended family at the reunion. I’m sorry, but this is just boring. I know it’s important for us to understand that it’s a loving family and for us to get to know and like this family so the utter brutality of what’s approaching will deeply affect us, but this stuff is just maudlin and boring. I, for one, knew what was coming, and wasn’t interested in seeing the family moments and stupid “I love you dad” fritterings knowing it would all come to naught. (That said, this looked like an authentic family reunion, with the pointless conversation, everyone looking half-like they’d rather be somewhere else, and the kids desperately trying to find SOMETHING to keep from dying of boredom. I’ve had more than my fair share of family reunions, and this one was pretty authentic.)
Well, the gunmen show up and brutally slaughter everyone. Brutal for Marvel, anyway. That’s not anything to sneeze at, but we’re not talking about Quentin Tarrentino here. Pretty straightforward mowing down of everyone in sight. Frank takes out one or two, and his wife and kid take off in a truck, pursued by the gunmen in their own vehicle. When the truck wrecks, Frank’s wife and son climb out (son mewling about a broken arm) only to get run down (literally) by their pursuers. Frank catches a round in the knee, and runs out of ammo. There’s a protracted “beating the shit out of Frank” scene, at the end of which Saint’s other son shoots him, point blank, in the chest. They leave him on a fueling pier, which they set on fire. The resulting explosion throws him out to sea.
Sufficient background establish for motivation? Yeah, we thought so.
Found by a local “witch doctor” Frank recuperates in his care. Then he sets out to return the favor.
Remarkably enough, the first thing he does is announce his return by showing up at a police media frenzy to publicly berate the police chief and prattle off perhaps the worst, most pointless lines of the whole movie. Blerg.
See, this didn’t make sense to me at all. Not just the rotten line, but why he’d announce that he was back. Just in case Saint didn’t get the point, Frank tore out his own gravestone, and left it on Saint’s golf course to drive the point home. The latter was a nice touch, but the former was just an awkward waste of time.
From there we get the natural progression. Saint tries to kill Frank, Frank sets plan into motion and bides time, Frank wins. Everyone else dies.
But there’s a sideline.
Frank is holed up in a real roach motel of an apartment. There he works on his car, outfits the place with hidden weapons, and finishes off about a bottle and a half of Wild Turkey every night. (Olympic-class drinker.) The alcoholism was actually a nice touch. A way of showing how the weight of the events was getting to Frank without having him loose his stoicism. But the thing is, he’s got neighbors. There’s Bumpo, a rotund (almost spherical) comical Italian chef, “Spacker” Dave with his twenty or so piercings and cringing violet demeanor, and Joan, the throwaway maybe-love interest who forms the embodiment of cognitive dissonance in the film as she tries desperately to make the film into something else entirely.
See, Joan has bad luck with men, and invariably picks the ones that not only treat her badly, but are built like a Mac truck. Even if Bumpo and Dave wanted to help, they’re not really equipped to do so. Frank is, so he does. They’re all grateful, and spend the rest of the movie trying to trick Frank out of his shell.
In the hands of a master director, this might have worked. This was not a master director. There’s a weird feel of sitcom-stuck-in-a-tragic-action-movie for each of their little routines. They trick Frank into coming over for a meal, all the while standing on edge like they’re afraid he’s gonna explode or something. Joan tries to fumble her way into a romance with Frank, only to be stopped cold. Joan is over in the corner having a meaningful moment all by herself, and Frank, ever the stoic, waits her out, mumbles a “whatever” and hits the door. Now paste that at regular intervals in-between the movie I’ve described, and you can see how the flick just can’t make up its mind what it wants to be.
But wait! There’s more! Frank has to fend off two contract killers during the slow part in the middle of the film. First of all, this introduces an absolutely absurd plot hole. Saint can’t find Frank. Saint can’t find Frank. Saint can’t find Frank. Saint hires Harry Heck. Ten minutes later, Harry Heck walks in on Frank in a diner run by his other two roommates. (Lengthy aside. I really liked Harry Heck. He was so utterly absurd I couldn’t help but like him. It was like Saint hired Elvis to kill the Punisher. Heck walks in, pulls out a guitar, sings a song about Frank, wraps it up, vaguely threatens Frank, and leaves. Not a bad song either.) Frank kills Harry. Saint can’t find Frank. Saint can’t find Frank. Saint hires the Russian. Five minutes later the Russian is ON FRANK’S DOORSTEP.
It’s not like Frank moved or anything. Why was he so hard to find?
Whereas the fight with Harry Heck was all polished Elvis charm followed up by an appropriately brutal assassination attempt, the fight with the Russian is played for straight slapstick yuks. Frank gets tossed around to the tune of Rigoletto from Bumpo’s apartment while he and the Russian go barreling through walls. There’s even time for a “you’ve got to be KIDDING me! Look from Frank after the Russian mashes his gun flat.
And that is followed immediately by probably the best, most intense scene of the film, where Quentin (Saint’s right hander) and a group of thugs torture Spacker Dave by pulling all of his piercings out with a Letherman multi-tool. They’re trying to get from Dave where Frank is hiding, but Dave ain’t telling. (You know, I swear I know this story.....but apparently the movie is based on “Welcome Back Frank” which is only three years old, and the style I’m thinking of was way back in the late eighties. Story’s by Garth Ennis, who I rank right up there with Alan Moore and William Ennis, though totally different.)
Sheesh. Deadpan, brooding, sitcom, humor, horror....... hold the fuck still! I can’t keep up!
Fast forward. Frank finally puts all his plans into motion, tricking Saint into thinking his wife was shacking up with Quentin, which was odd, since Quentin was gay. (Making him the first queer villain in an action film since......hmmm..... Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd in James Bond’s “Diamonds are Forever.” Let’s hear it for equal opportunity! Seriously, I rank the inability of writers to give their villains attributes like homosexuality without trying to make some sort of point out of it a mark of how far we have yet to go for true social acceptance.) Saint kills them both, rather horribly (and with his one good line ....”The only problem is you have too much fucking furniture”... completely swallowed by the tenor of the scene) and then Frank comes in and kills him. Oh, and his organization. And his son.
And then, as Saint lies there on the ground, shot through the chest and bleeding out, we get to see something we’ve never seen before. The hero steps up and GLOATS over the villain.......before setting him on FIRE and BLOWING HIM UP. Holy shit. There’s some meaningless denouement where Frank leaves cash for the roomies to cover his part of the damage deposit. Actually, no, there’s a good part at the very end where Frank, having done what he came to do, prepares to blow his own head off, but decides not to. Exit on lame-ass line.
So, the verdict is schizophrenia. If you’re like me, and can justify a movie if they manage to get everything right for even just a few minutes, then this is a good movie. The scene of Dave’s torture, just flat enjoying Harry Heck’s absurdity, and the pure viciousness of the very end make it all worth it....though you may want to skip the first third. If you’re a fan of the comics.......I really don’t know. Everyone else? You’ll probably find something better to do with your time. The badly-delivered comic book lines, the spastic genre jumping, the plot holes.... not much here for you to enjoy. Oh, ‘cept maybe the ladies. Frank spends about a third of the film wandering around with his shirt off. I’m no judge of these things, so the ladies will have to make their own estimation on that count.
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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