Raiders of Raiders of the Lost Ark

A good friend of mine cited timing as being everything.  He wrote eruditely of the boomers, in context of their timing with rock and roll.  I will take his lead to do the same.

While I loathe calling it so, Generation X commenced in 1964.  Its imagination grew in the the 70’s and early ‘80s.  It’s one of the reasons that Star Wars is such a big thing on the internet.  Culture and technology interacting.

Sleight of hand aside, that film is not my purpose, nor is Raiders of the Lost Ark.  I was just trying to attract your attention. 

That film, Raiders, was one of the first films I ventured out of my neighbourhood to see, unsupervised (so I am a full on gen x).  My friends and I went into a newfangled far away thing called a Cineplex, and used our g-rated tickets to get into Raiders.  We walked out afterward into the bright light in ecstasy.  Nothing had ever prepared us for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

 I was torn between how badly I wanted to be Dr. Jones, or have my father be Dr. Jones.

By the time of the second film several years later, I was already lost in arson, theft and other adolescent norms in a bad neighbourhood and such is the chasm of a few years: a far cry from dreaming of adventure.  I never saw the second film until much later.  When I did, I was angry, it seemed cheapened.  It did not remind me of that rich time of childhood when everything was possible.  The first time I encountered it, I think I turned it off.  It seemed to capitalize in a paltry way on the Indie magic in a way that only seems more common today.

If you were young from ’75-85, you are a warm loved child of Spielberg and Lucas.  Why would I have missed and then hated this film?  Jaws came out in ’75; Close Encounters in ’77; Star Wars also came out in ’77, and Empire in ’81.  By the time Temple Of Doom Came out, these crazy lovable films, originally dreamed up by renegades, were being made by wealthy icons beholden to industry.  I missed some of these in the theatre, but basked in them under the golden glow of late night television.Then along came The Thing, and then The Terminator.

I love my youth in film.  I really do.  I had the best of Henson, of Lucas, of Spielberg, of Carpenter, of Cameron.  Unfortunately all that gorgeous mythical beauty spawned the blockbuster.  They inspired big fast films that gripped our needs.  And I had great films later, but they all seemed to keep being watered down.  I do not believe in a golden age.  I think great films happened before my time, and continue to evolve after my time.  But the blockbuster has a monetary hold that it doesn’t deserve and that shapes it into a factory product often enough.  And it derives from my demographic going to the cinema.

I won’t do the math here, but you can look for yourself.  The big blockbusters that spawned our current producer spending habits all made 10-25 times their budget.  It’s no wonder that moguls took notice.  But now, we have big stupid action pieces with no mythos, nothing memorable and they earn 1.25 times their budgets and in the big dollars, that is just barely enough. 

I’m not a curmudgeon.  Some great movies come out of this popcorn film industry.  Little dramas like Monsters, and big extravaganzas like the way the new Batman movies have grabbed people. But the drama, and creative pictures by story tellers are vanishing.  Instead, we get silly blockbusters with truly cut-out characters and they don't enchant so much, hell we hardly pay attention to them even while watching them

 

I will admit that as a guy reaching middle age, who never met his dreams, I am more willing than ever to see films that distract me from that, and to forgive a cheap effort.

But I am trying to watch Temple Of Doom, and all I can see is the fate of so many films that have come out in the last 25 years.  I feel robbed, not just my child eyes, but my adult eyes too.

There are great movies that are not artistic.  This is where Harrison Ford comes in, because he was involved in some of the best.  Not every movie has to be great, they can’t all be great, but sometimes they are epic.  Sometimes because they were not planned by marketing agencies, or tested, they tap into a vein, someone's inner wonder of something remarkable.  Sometimes they find an unknown icon. 

But in recent times, the films that stand in for great are not actually great or epic.  They are simply tableaus elaborated by visionary music video directors, made into hopeful-iconic pictures.  They are forgettable fodder for our forgettable lives. There are more big set piece films a year than in my entire childhood nowadays, and yet they don't take up memory or cultural meaning like they once did.  I still vividly remember line ups around the block for Superman.  There's already been several big expensive sci-fi movies this year that captured no one's imagination--and it is still winter. 

One of the things I liked about Avatar, which is true whether one loved or hated it, is it was the only movie people talked about that winter, spring and summer.  And some people were as affected by thinking about a race like the Na'avi as people at the end of the seventies were by thinking about Yoda.

Did your childhood teach you to deal with austerity?

The sun is drifting away and winter is on the horizon. This time of year always makes me nostalgic and frightened. There’s no conflict there: it’s a time of dying and blowing away so we think of things that are gone. And in Canada, it is the harbinger of the long human-lethal season. So naturally my thoughts turn to times gone by simply to avoid thinking about impending winter.

This moment’s nostalgia goes to a Saturday morning animated cartoon called Fat Albert. It was an early seventies creation of Bill Cosby’s back when he was a stand up comedian and long before America became comfortable with the Huxtables.

It’s very alien compared to today’s cartoons (not that I watch cartoons). It exists in a realistic context and that real world is poverty. Just try and sell that to a network, “hey, I’ve got a show about impoverished kids who muck about in a junkyard looking for ways to get by”. Just try and sell that, I dare you. But this show was born in the shadow of the oil embargo that strangled America and left it for dead for many years, you know, the years where America sacrificed its manufacturing industry to save banking profits. I don’t know why I bring that up since today’s children’s shows don’t reflect anything of reality.

You may not remember the day to day adventures of the Cosby kids, but you may remember the specials. There was the Christmas special, where our gang finds a homeless couple having a baby in the dump because they were evicted by their rich landlord. Holy Christian imagery aside, it was a holiday special about the plight of homeless people and detailed the horrific experience of a woman giving birth at a landfill. Then there was the Halloween special. Our gang loves this holiday because they don’t have to feel hungry (they tell us this). After braving a scary house and realising that the old witch is a nice old lady, our gang wanders home sated, feeling jubilant that they got to drink soda pop. So, no ipods, no Xboxes, no extra huge burger king meals, they have reached the pinnacle of childhood excess because they got to drink soda.

Day to day, the fat Albert gang need help in coping with the conundrums they face. Naturally, they get this from a wino who lives in a park, named Mudfoot. He is a recurring character who always helps the kids out. He’s sort of Yoda in ripped clothing with a bottle of wine.

The thing I find most fascinating is that their home base or headquarters is a garbage dump. In the show this is called a junk yard, because, assumedly once upon a time there were junk yards and not just landfills. Most opening shots in the show feature a hollowed out manufacturing city that pans into the dump. Fat Albert and the gang often repurpose the junk they find to facilitate their adventures. In the same fashion they finance several adventures through the activity of collecting bottles, cans and paper to sell to recycling.

In one episode they all want musical instruments. When all their cash gathering attempts fail they create instruments from the garbage they find in the junk yard. They form a band that provides musical interludes throughout the series.

We have to assume their parents have work, though it must pay abysmally considering the state of the kids. Parents are never around. These kids need to navigate the world and learn for themselves. Kinda like the kids in my neighbourhood so long ago. Kids are kids, but kids who are marched from violin class to playdate and back home are not kids Albert or i could relate to.

I think I must be getting old because I get these urges to recount tales of my childhood that seem magical to me and extinct in the modern context. I don’t think my nine year old would relate to Fat Albert the way I do. It’s almost too bad. The world is crumbling fast and I feel like the resourceful imaginative kids from Fat Albert, and Fat Albert’s time might fare better in an uncertain age where wealth dwindles and your violin and videogame skills don’t help you. The Fat Albert kids will cope better with austerity and the economic meltdown that is only just unfolding. hey hey hey.

Mad Max: The Classic and The Apocrypha

The other night my local popcorn house screened one of those holy of holies, 1979’s Mad Max. I live in a town of cinema lovers and a good twelve of us made the pilgrimage through the new climate’s perpetual rain to pay our respects to feverish visions of collapse. It was a glorious night of scratchy popping images and sound that rivals that of those doohickeys you hung off your car door at the drive-in.

Remember drive-ins: we loved our cars so very much we didn’t even want to get out of them when we went to the movies. That sentiment is significant to the version of Mad Max that got off the ground.

Mad Max opens with the cryptic words “A few years from now” printed on the screen as we pan back from the arches of a really dilapidated Halls Of Justice swaying in a drought plagued wind. With that we are introduced to a failing industrial town limping along in the early days of financial collapse. The town population idle about in diners and trailers, pretending the world is normal. It’s not unlike a scenario a “few years from now” where folk drink weak tea and wait patiently for the recession to end.

The film focuses on two kinds of disenfranchised youth. The first are marauding bands of unemployed young men who carouse and ride the roads on stolen gas. They are like ghosts who mime the things they knew from previous life: looping through endless commutes between town centres and distant factory jobs.

Because we have all studied a little sociology, we know things can’t go well from here. A society is in peril when it cannot employ its youth. Men without a function quickly regress into an aggressive antagonistic state, and men without paychecks cannot secure wives and even more quickly regress into leather pants, motorcycles and bizarre homoerotic theatrical rituals. I know it is true because I have seen it in Mad Max.

The other kind of disenfranchised youth, and I will say here, it takes a subtle film goers eye to differentiate them as they also parade about the highway in defiant leather using mayhem as a desperate stopgap to keep the immense despair of civilization’s collapse from pouring down onto them, are the local police. They recall Little Alex’s colleagues from A Clockwork Orange who trade in their gang colours for a civil servant paycheck(or at least a vehicle) in one of those professions that truly blossom when the shit hits the fan. See, if you had spent your vacations in South America, India or Russia instead of some disney resort island, you would already have a template for crumbling societies where the wealthy retract every limb they can and employ as much of the riffraff as possible as security enforcers to keep regular folk away from the canned tuna and the soda pop. Perhaps that is why the lead villain was named Toecutter—he sought to nibble away at the edges of what power remained.

You might be inclined, in these first few minutes, to think that perhaps you are about to watch a film about the last of the heroes holding civil society together and at bay from nefarious barbarous haters of law, order and good hygiene. But again, this is a film of subtlety and nuance—it’s not just guns and macked out cars. The action sequence that opens the film has virtually the entire town’s police force running down a villain until they kill him in a fiery explosion of overkill. We know he is a villain because we witness him . . . speeding. Not only does he speed, but he goes by a pseudonym(as only super villains do), The Night Rider, and he spouts nihilist poetry right into the radio. This is an instructive part of the film. If you are trying to hang tightly to the remnants of society, you don’t invest in schools or civic projects, you hammer down on the citizens who have nothing left to lose, the ones who've gone a little batshit because they were on the edges that fell apart first.

I won’t give away the rest of the film for those who haven’t seen it, but in between the Village People antics of the Last Police and some bizarrely idyllic moments of Max’s family life, we get to bear witness to the final crumblings of civilization, which of course open the doorways to the apocalypse and a spectacular film franchise.

It’s almost sad to note that George Miller had virtually no budget for his fantasy film and had to resort to filming reality. So, the dusty dying towns are real, the boarded up buildings are real, the deserted industrial plants are very real. Inadvertently, Mr. Miller struck a chord in the film goer by basically filming a documentary and punctuating it with exploding cars.

What is less familiar to people is his original script, the one before even his meagre financial backers got their sticky fingers into it.

George Miller was an emergency room doctor, that is to say the sort of person with an enormous will to work long and hard and face ugliness with optimism and determination. Not the sort of man who makes depressing end of the world films. I have it on good authority from the internet that his original script was much more uplifting.

In it, the film opens on the same scenario, only our cast responded differently.

Being the last formal social institution standing, and inspired by the same “the people need a hero” speeches that made it to the final cut, our heroes throw out the rules they knew from the dominant economy. They sell off most of the town’s cars and motorcycles to a nearby city that isn’t yet so badly degraded as the periphery. They cannibalize and sell off great chunks of the various industrial plants too. With the seed money, Max starts a horse ranch. Miller depicts him as the kind of visionary hero who invests for the long haul: Horses, of course are self-fuelling, self-reproducing labour and transportation machines that also manufacture fertilizer. Goose, in an inspired fit of pragmatism, uses his share of the seed money to start an ostrich farm. The hearty plains birds do well in the outback and provide a steady food supply to the town that the world forgot. Yes, in the original, we don’t have to watch vibrant life-affirming Goose get barbecued. Soon everyone is gainfully employed in the busy pursuit of keeping the community alive and well.

Initially, before they retire the last of the cars, they form road crews who, with pickaxes, tear up segments of the highways at intervals, to make their little oasis less inviting to those who would just pillage their way to the end. The recently unemployed chemical engineers from the plant immediately start repurposing the asphalt for more constructive uses.

The mechanical engineers, relieved from the odious and underemployed duty of keeping the cars running set themselves to building windmills and other equipment that can generate electricity from the surrounding environment. With very little formal education, many of the towns people get in on these endevours. It was to be filmed as a montage to BTO's "Taking Care Of Business"

The until now perpetually unemployed post grads from various humanities programs form the ambassador league and build ties with nomadic indigenous tribes who are developing a loose trading web with other towns. There is a glorious scene where, once the cancerous growth economy is abandoned, it becomes clear how easy it is to forge alliances with the aboriginals. Had it been filmed, the audience could have thrilled in the tension of watching tribes who might have essentially taken control of the economy as pedestrian railway barons--overseers of all trade, but instead form mutually beneficial trade schemes, as had been their wont for millennia.

the third act opens a year later and a majority of the biker gangs have come asking to trade labour for food and are accepted into the town and it turns out there was nothing especially villainous about them.

The final scenes, had they been filmed would undoubtedly have earned Mel an Oscar. George’s script was, even in this benevolent version, still called Mad Max. Just for very different reasons. The film was to close many years down the road. An aging Max has become one of the town story tellers. He entertains and educates the children with frightening tales of how things were before. He speaks of poisonous smoke billowing into the sky, of faceless men in the castles called “banks” who decreed when people could work, and whether they were allowed shelter. We, as the audience, can see his stories for what they are, cautionary tales, designed in a “lest we forget” fashion. There is a perversion of these scenes in the third Mad Max movie, so all was not lost.

The great ending warmth that was to bring the audience to tears comes from Max saying these are his tales of the Mad World that came before, and the children laugh merrily at Max, unable to believe any of his stories because they are just too far fetched, and they dub him “Mad Max”.

The screen fades with max looking up into the clear starlit sky with a never-lost relieved look. Wind turbines tilt lazily in the background, and just before the screen goes dark, we see the soft loving look of Max’s wife pushing some grey hair behind her ear as she watches the children cavorting about over top of Max in their glee.

Well, anyway, that version of the script never got made, but we still got a pretty nifty Mad Max Trilogy, revolving around violence and a lust for fuel. Pure fantasy, I know(it's not like the whole world will go to war over gas), but not every movie can be a social drama.

Fuck Those Fucking Fucks – Treme

I get sucked into lots of TV. It is the balm on the curse of a small life. Some of it is really terrible, like Smallville, yet I watch rabidly. Some of it is damned sublime, like the Shakespearean Deadwood. Some shows cut me to the bone: The claustrophobic dread of the Shield, the political knots in Rome. Yes, it’s “just tv”, not a real art form to be commented on like painting or literature. Though, if you step back from snobdom, tv is sort of like literature and painting combined.

I’ve been watching this show called Treme. I never checked it out, due to it’s unfortunate title that looks like a slang for extreme. I thought it was a cross between Fear factor and Jackass(and if you don't know what they are, then good on you for not being a slave to the boob tube). Turns out it is “Treah-May”, a neighbourhood in New Orleans steeped in history, energy and mystique.

At first, I thought of it as an ensemble drama, it does after all have a sprawling cast. I realised soon in that it only has two cast members, and they do such an intricate dance, it’s hard to tell who the lead is. One character is music, and the other is community. I suppose their union creates New Orleans. A ripe and debauched and crippled city of tight communities tied to the music that drives their identity.

Now, I am an obsessive jazz fan—needs to be said at the outset as it biases my view. So, let it be known, that if in between the musical segments all they had were sock puppets telling fart jokes, I would probably love this show. At least half of the show is musical segments, and they are glorious and diverse. Creole, oldie time jazz, bebop, zydeco, honkey-tonk, classical violin, bluegrass, hip-hop, tribal traditional. This show is like moving into the Smithsonian with a live band.

Some of the character seem chosen to remind you of real players. One character, a trombone player, is the absolute spitting image down to the haircut, of Cannonball Adderly(who played sax). Another character, a son who has abandoned new Orleans for greater heights and is torn about capitalizing on his roots, looks a lot like Wynton Marsalis. He has a bandmate on sax who needs to be chosen for the Coltrane biopic(please make one, he was a god and lead a cinematic life). Treme is also rife with real musicians, some of them famous, and some local celebrities, who simply play themselves. One really nice touch is Kermit Ruffins, a trumpeter, who sings with a voice like Miles Davis (and bears a passing resemblance).

While watching this show, I constantly have to pause and look up references to Creole language, bands and musicians as well as locales. learning what "second-line" means was fascinating. No, this not a distraction, but a joyous exploration and it lets me know that the writers did their work and the producers went whole hog with it. you can watch it without the research, but even if you are steeped in lore, you still benefit from research, that is how richly textured this show is.

Now, if all they did was present visually stimulating music, that would be awesome. If all they did was add to that some vignette/slice of life images of the people of New Orleans, that would make it that much richer. But no, they had to set the bar really really fucking high, and do the music so thick you can smell it, and characters so real, you might know them, and then on top of that all, they did in fact include a season reaching plot arc that draws everything together. It is, in fact very intense, if you are willing to watch through it all. It has to be viewed as a ten hour movie, rather than an episodic show. As a guy who cut his teeth on Russian literature, I can totally get down with a ten hour plot arc driven by a huge cast of deeply nuanced characters.

We all laugh at tv whether we watch it or not. We deride it, we complain that we are being spoken down to, we lament the end of culture. And then something like Treme comes along and sets us on our heads.

As I watched, enchanted, I kept thinking: I know this city, I know these people. It was absurd, I’ve never been deeper into the US than the “Canadian” states of Maine and New Hampshire.

There was something about the mood, the tone, the hijinx, the exuberance. Finally it came to me, it was something about the Joie De Vivre.

Of course I knew this city! Deep in culture and music, drowning in poverty and political corruption. It was Montreal during the deep depression that has spanned most of my life.

I was conceived in Montreal, family driven out by politics and circumstance, and I returned as an adult and lived through some of the greatest times anyone could know. Sometimes fate or economics drives a city under its heel, and cities die. Cities like New Orleans or Montreal throw a party, flip you the bird and keep right on thriving.

I feel tempted to bring out my most beautiful ghosts of a Montreal passed, but will save that for another post. This post was for television. Treme is cinema verite, I know this. Even if it wasn’t, it would still be theatre at its best. You smell the mould, and taste the rich cuisine. You can’t sit still, you have to dance, then you have to go out and find some smokey place to dance. You have to dig out your old albums. You have to dig up your old friends. You have to remember what is best about living.

I saw a trailer for what will most likely be a profitable bad movie based on a profitable bad book. It details a character who “used to have a hunger for life, and I want it back”. I understood the trailer, it twanged my rusty heart strings, but it was cheap pablum. Treme is the real thing. It reminds you about important things, passionate things, delightful things. And it doesn’t cheat you while doing it. It doesn’t take advantage of you or make fun of you, or make you a demographic.

It’s just raw fucking power of voice and song and narrative.

I don’t sling tv very often, despite being a junkie, but I will sling this one. I write this sitting under one of my very favourite possessions: a photo of Thelonious Monk sitting on a curb in an alley eating a plate of beans—part of his payment for playing some club somewhere, back in the day. I love Monk more than most anything and that one unassuming picture somehow seems to sum up my love. When I watch Treme, I get the same feeling I get when I look up at that picture.

Apocalypse Please, Hold the Propaganda.

Now, I like me some horror films. I like the silly creature features that prophesize giant insects to address human hubris. Sometimes they even scare me. I like the prurient slasher films, meeting our worst empty nest fears. I especially love supernatural and theological horror films, that fill you with true unease and dread about unseen forces that resonate within your cultural psyche, regardless of religious denomination. Give me catholic fear of The Exorcist and The Omen and I will quake.

Those films that tap into our deepest cultural and religious mythology really scare the hell out of me. And going deeper, they touch my perennial fears of the beyond. . . touch my ghost fears like Stir of Echoes or White Noise. They touch my existential dread of nightmares beyond our world. I eat them up as nice safe fears. Cathartic. Just as they were intended. Whether it is atomic ants in Them, or Norman Bates channeling his mother in Psycho, ghostly sailors in The Fog, a fear demon in the Boogey Man, or vengeful spirits in Mirrors, I like getting scared stupid, sitting in the dark in front of the magic shadows. And I usually thank the filmmakers afterwards for making me sweat.

Unfortunately, there are films that scare me far more. We have war movies that glorify the extension of empire, dramas that romanticize exploitive capitalism. Romantic comedies that project magic elixirs for relationships There really are no shortage of scary movies that aren’t the fun kind. The worst kind, are the ones that disguise themselves as nice genre escapes, the ones that pretend to alleviate our fears by indulging them.

Take the apocalypse film. It is usually so delectably fun. Mad Max, or Waterworld. Even A Boy And His Dog which had interesting gender commentary was still mostly an adolescent festival.

But I just watched one tonight, The Book of Eli. It turned my delicious dinner into a bad bout of sphincter clenching dashes to the bathroom.

These films look the same from the outside, but it’s what particular dreamy realities are being sold to us quietly that differentiates healthy pleasures from poisons. It’s all about the mythology. And it is all about the psychological hooks for the audience. Slasher films give us some sophomore morality plays about average behaviour—drugs, booze, sex—in the mythology its all capital punishment bad news, leading to an unstoppable killer coming to get you in unique cinematic ways. It reminds teens of the fears they have, as they begin the decision making part of their lives, and gives release to parental fears. Their crimes are not real, and neither are their punishments. It’s all about the fear.

And in so many theologic films, we’re given a blood freezing tale, that finally in the end gives us a rerun to order and justice in a world of powers beyond our reach. We are given to understand that there are force we cannot understand(whether political or supernatural), but we are also given to understand there are safeguards in place(in the case of theologic horror films they are usually hermetic priests and innocents, with the odd jaded sinner, and in reality, they are teams of scientists,journalists and activists).

All of these genre tropes were born in a wealthy culture riding the greatest tide of wealth and power that there ever was in history. The greatest wealth and power there ever will be. The greatest wealth and power that is now slipping away, inexorably, with nothing in human imagination to stop it or slow it down.

In the fifties, there was an atomic fear, which gave us all our glorious mutated bug movies. The thing is, it was an anxiety over a possibility, an outside chance that the technological optimism of the era might prove wrong, that the military guard dogs of empirical wealth might gamble poorly. It still may play out, but so far it has mostly been a fear. It is the parable of technology out of control.

The thing is now, people make glib comparisons of those anxieties to today’s, and there is an error. Atomic spiders were a symbol of unknown fears. Ghosts stealing children expressed anxiety of childhood disease—a possibility, but unlikely conclusion.

There is a huge difference between allegorical, or metaphorical expressions of emotional fear, and fantastic dreams about real issues.

A few years ago we were given The Day After Tomorrow, expressing our fears about global warming. But it projected a single defining event, and offered the panacea that an oppressed overpopulated country, weak on resources would welcome hundreds of millions of refugees and somehow be able to sustain them. Personally, I have an easier time believing in the giant Ants.

More recently we had 2012. A mystic prophecy foretells a random event, something in technobabble having to do with solar neutrinos, up there with Lucas’ midichlorians, that makes earth unfit for humans—but luckily “arcs” are built, saving the best and brightest, and the most tenacious. Well that's a yummy gene pool for a happy ending. All the worst of humanity weeded out, and a new earth for all our captains of industry and science, nicely wrapped up in a biblical bow. It’s not cathartic release. It’s opiates for real fears.

This is a trend. Most recently we are delivered The Book of Eli. The earth is devastated by who knows what. Nuclear war, shredded ozone, a blistered drought brought on by carbonized atmosphere. Who cares, the apocalypse has come and it is dusty and desperate, except that one man is on a mission carrying a bible. Yes, a bible, not a book of Eli, just a bible like you would find in any motel on the way to the apocalypse. God knows it didn’t help us over the last couple thousand years. It’s been prone to causing wars, secrecy, lynchings, witch hangings, empirical justification; damn, the whole thing is based on an extended torture followed by lynching for that matter. But somehow, instead of cathartic release from our fears, we are given saccharine succour that our tawdry religious remnants have it all in hand. It’s all part of the plan. That’s what is disgusting about these films. They don't make ridiculous, our fears. Nor do they validate them. The seek to neutralize them with pathetic justifications based on nihilism and fantasy.

The internet is full of journalists pleading for people to listen to the fact that some of our most powerful people believe the earth is worthless, and this life is transitory, and that all our warring efforts, poisons and industry are simply a step on the path to some heavenly purpose. And now, instead of even being given some catharsis for our fears, we are supposed to swallow some last ditch dust ridden god mission proving this so?

I had to stop the film, despite being a hardened fan of apocalypse films. I would rather have rooted for the sycophantic opportunistic mafia type leader of the burgeoning post-world communities who wants some consolidation of his leadership so things can be reorganized than a god driven shepherd bringing the holy bible wherever it needed to go.

I couldn’t finish watching the Hollywood maniac machinery deliver its tired version of a desired ending for apocalyptic christians. I didn’t give up too prematurely. But I realized we had Denzel as Adam, and his needy bride (from That Seventies Show), blazing the way, bleeding and stoic, to carry the word of god, and I just couldn’t take it. Or maybe they are both Moses. It doesn't matter. that frightening audience will take a mash up as long as they get the right signifiers. But, I just wasn't buying the ugliest ending of our world(too close to real possibility) being made relevant by the continuance of an ugly religion that paved the way for the destruction.

I had an easier time swallowing pagan gods assisting the salvation of Christian Word in The Secret of Kells. At least that was told in a beautiful myth that combined mythology and adventure with a digestible version of cultural succession in an ongoing world that we did not rule or pretend to rule.

A long fan of all forms of narrative, I am becoming wary of any use for it. I fear narrative no longer informs, but simply deludes. apocalypse with popcorn.

movies again. . .that's winter for you

We are deep into that time of year when I find myself watching far more tv than usual in a desperate bid to cope with cabin fever and SAD. If I could hibernate I would. The next best thing is a mental escape. Not only to I spend more time in front of the tube, but I'm usually looking for viewing with maximum kick. I need something flashy enough to get through the fog and simple enough for my dulled senses to appreciate.

The flic I just watched completely took me away. It had everything I adore in a movie. The camera was decadent and took me places far-flung from my normal experience. The characters were larger than life. It had rich resonant themes, portraying conflicted loyalties, bids for freedom against all odds, and the power of love. And it had utterly breathtaking special effects that had you squirming in your seat. Not least, it sure didn’t hurt that it had a sweeping dramatic score.

The film takes the audience to a lush tropical paradise populated by a tribe of happy carefree natives who live closely aligned to the rhythms of nature. This Eden-like place, though has been occupied by a cold capitalist colonial force, portrayed in stark contrast to the child-like natives. The mingling of cultures does produce sympathizers among the colonials, as indeed, we the audience are directed. The story introduces a cocky, fearless and good-natured hero, whose adventure is set in motion when he tries slipping on the appearance of the foreigners. There really isn’t anything that special about the hero except that he is the rallying spirit of the people.

The director shakes you all about, you experience glee and lightheartedness watching the natives, you channel some anger and indignant sense of injustice and some moral outrage. There is suspense, and hope. And, watching the tragic decimation of the natives, there is heartbreak. By the end of the film, there is freedom, redemption, transformation.

I suppose some criticism is easy enough to level.

The characters were a bit cardboard cut-out, the dialogue stilted in places, occasionally painfully so. The tale may have been a bit on the unlikely side and it had a simplistic kind of morality to it.

I imagine some people watching it lament the dumbing down of cinema, and grouse about the nature of blockbusters with their pretty, vacant faced stars. And while everyone was impressed with the special effects(I know I was), some people probably were so taken by the spectacle as to wonder if it wasn’t a game changer, forever raising the bar for how dazzled we expect to be and what kind of content we want in film.

Have you had a chance to see the film I'm talking about? It’s called The Hurricane; it was directed by John ford in 1937. (and, yes, in 2010, the special effects are still awesome and nerve-wracking). I won’t say anything more about the story of The Hurricane, other than that it isn’t much like Avatar at all, despite my deceptive comparisons. But, I do highly recommend watching it, it is a powerful film.

So, The Hurricane just got me thinking about the kind of movies we love. We enjoy clever twist movies, and slice of life dramas, lofty period pieces, romantic films, and we love our thrillers. But the sort of movies that chew up the most box-office, the kind we most often revisit, re-watch, those films take distilled elements from all the other kinds of stories we like, ratchet them up and package them in the most outlandish stories set in exotic places, told at dizzying pace with every bit of eye-candy Hollywood can muster. The characters are often reduced to symbols of the trait they embody, or their role in the plot. The plots themselves don’t withstand the slightest bit of deconstruction and mighty loads of disbelief needs be suspended to get us all the way through to the resolution.

We call them blockbusters. Critics typically hate them. Everybody laughs or grumps about what is silly about them. But we flock to them time and time again. I'm never sure why it is the norm to be derisive or dismissive of the kinds of films that so many people obviously enjoy. it's like we can't get enough of them, but then are ashamed afterwards and have to distance ourselves from the child-like glee we felt

We are moved by Keannu Reeves love for Carrie Ann-Moss in The Matrix and in the third film we get our cinematic kiss filmed in a beautiful homage to the golden age of cinema . We bite our nails with tension when the dinosaurs are after the children in any Jurassic Park movie. We root like mad for the rebels and their strange mystics to give a come-uppance to the empire. We’ve been astonished and saddened by King Kong in various incarnations for nearly 80 years. We are enchanted to be taken to utopic Shangri-La in 1937’s Lost Horizon(which at the time was the most expensive production ever made)

People often label the blockbuster as something invented or discovered with the movie, Jaws. Or some date it to Star Wars, but the truth is Hollywood has always delivered blockbusters, mainly because we like them. Hell, Homer and Ovid were delivering blockbusters long, long ago. And yet blockbusters are viewed as some kind of insulting de-evolution of film and story-telling. Audiences feign disdain while rushing out to get tickets for the next over-blown hoopla. They wish for better movies, but there isn't actually a shortage of "better" movies, it's just not where the audience dollar tends to go.

I think blockbusters often offer us a wonderful gift. They invite us to leave our brains at the door. You know, our tired, stressed out, consumed-with-mundane-details-of-life brains. The blockbusters disarm us and leave us open to wonder. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a complex psychological drama that lets me explore aspects of the human condition and gets me thinking and leaves me with new perspectives and reflections when the lights come up. But I also really love swooping emotions, epic arcs, desirable ideals, heroes you can trust, identifiable villains, madcap adventure, thrills and danger, allegories.

Deep in the icy belly of winter and its engulfing nights I find greater comfort in Raiders of the Lost Ark than The English Patient even though I loved them both. Ghandi was a tremendous movie that influenced me during impressionable adolescence, but I have seen it exactly once, while I cannot count how many times I’ve seen Jurassic Park(especially during winter). One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest was a groundbreaking movie, but Star Wars became part of English vernacular, and is still relevant to people, and if it were put back in the theatre would still be selling out seats.

I wonder at the etymology of the word blockbuster. The image I always have, is line-ups of people that wrap around the block. I remember these line-ups(before the era of multiplexes). I remember them for Superman, for the Empire Strikes Back. I was such a small child in those lines, but remember them. When the Spiderman movie came out a few years back, even the multiplex made everyone line up outside. It was miserably hot, my gang of nerds had no water and it was hours of waiting. And yet you could feel the thrilling hum in the line-up: Building in anticipation and excitement.

Avatar had been playing for more than a month before I managed to get tickets. That wasn’t artificial hype because the distributors were restricting the number of screens it played on--it's been playing on almost every screen, sucking up revenue from all the other films screening. And that bugger lived up with perfect blockbuster qualities!

Without a shred of irony, here's a mid-winter cheers to blockbusters!

We are wild animals

I have been blessed lately that every film I have released my sweaty dollars to recently has been gorgeous, rich, and deep in reflective fodder. If I wasn’t lazy, and busy with other things, I would write lengthy appreciations of them all. As it is, I just want to meander for a moment on a theme that emerges from them despite differing genres, mediums and what not. So without further ado, here are some thoughts on recent theatre excursions that all left me feeling enriched rather than only distracted.


The Fantastic Mr. Fox. This is a glorious and unique visual spectacle incorporating every animating technique there is. It takes a sophisticated (in its own right) child’s tale, by master, Roald Dahl, and imbues it with all of Wes Anderson’s charms—understated wit, an element of surrealism, awkward spaces, some poignant existentialism, and a genius use of sound and music.

Mr. Fox is a chicken thief, arrogant and cheeky and in love with his own cleverness, that is, up until his mate announces her pregnancy. The inevitable settling down occurs, and Mr. Fox does a fine job of being a father and husband, yet is unsatisfied with his life, and longs for things that are more true to his nature.

Throughout the film, even as events get more complicated, Mr. Fox maintains a maxim, and underpins all his ideas with the bold statement “we are wild animals”. It’s a lament and a call to arms. A plea and a definitive motto to change the way the characters conduct themselves. It is difficult not to question a parallel here. The animals in the film are sedate, middleclass sub-urban types, with civil jobs, conservative clothing, and all the trappings of civilization. And yet, our hero longs for his animal nature. He longs for a simpler existence that makes more sense to him. Mr. Fox is a buffoon, and does not make sound plans despite his charms, and yet, by the end of the film, he wins over his fellow animals with his own modern compromise to being a wild animal.

Avatar. I grew up on James Cameron, and his allegories about technology, society and the military forces that support empires. His new film, while surpassing all others visually, in creating a living breathing alien world that leaves your mouth hanging open, is a continuation of themes he has pursued throughout his career. Avatar utilizes all the classic tropes of myth. A hero from afar, the heroes journey of growth and discovery. Transformation. Prophecy. Reconnection with nature.

Our heroes journey takes him from being human, to being animal. He leaves his uniform and machines behind to live in a body with a tail and keen sense of smell and hearing, and to live in the jungle. Once he is accepted into the tribe, he is told, in no uncertain terms, “we’ll see if we can cure you of your insanity”. And here we have the whole film.

The bad guys aren’t evil, they’re nuts. They live in a psychotic break from reality and are isolated from everything meaningful. The corporate face says to his people, in frustration, “we don’t have anything they want.” And there it is. All the trappings and comforts of wealth and civilization mean nothing to the beings of Pandora. Everything we have achieved and hold dear, and can think of to offer to trade for a mineral beneath their soil amounts to nothing to the Naa’vi. so much for economics.

Our hero, enters the story a cripple with lifeless legs, who wishes more than anything, in Pinnochio fashion, to be whole. His adventures on Pandora make him whole again by teaching him that it wasn’t his legs that held him back from being whole. In essence, our hero renounces his humanness to embrace his animalness.

The Princess And The Frog. I'm not a big fan of Disney, by any means, but I have to say, this one harkened back to the look and feel of films from 40-60 years ago. Gone are the incongruous references to pop culture and other self-referential nonsense meant to amuse adults while disconnecting everyone from the story. And gone are the ugly angular drawings of modern fare. I am reluctant to say it, but this was Disney magic.

Unlike many animated stories, rather than simply having anthropomorphic animals, our heroes are humans, transformed into animals and for both the hero(the girl) and the sidekick(the prince) the way they both overcome their shortcomings and finally achieve valuable things in their life, is through animal experience. Towards the climax of the film, you wondered if they were going to remain frogs—as a happy ending.

And like the animal world that we try and pretend doesn’t exist, and certainly shield our children from (inexplicably), the danger in this story is palpable. Our motley band of heroes, despite praying to the stars, are at risk, and one dies before the end of the film.

This may sound strange, but I was so overjoyed, sitting in the darkened theatre with my daughter, to see that the villain was scary, and the images of his supernatural world were frightening, and that he was a true villain and snuffed out one of the heroes. I don’t know what kind of world we want lie to our children about, or how that gives them the emotional experiences that will prepare them for adulthood, but just like Grimm’s tales, this film allows children to explore different spaces and states of mind in a fairly safe place to learn from. I'll take film trauma over film pablum everyday of the week, thank you very much.

Fairy tale or not, the humans in this tale only achieve the day by regaining their animal senses.

Where The Wild Things Are. One of the most turbulent times in life is a very specific moment in childhood when a person individuates. The passage from being a child, where everything is simply related to one’s own perspective and needs, to the realization that one is separate from others is chaotic and painful. Suddenly there is a pandemonium of individuals and needs in conflict with each other and the child begins to see his own role in the tempest.

I can’t think of anyone who could have done this better than Spike Jonze. This is not an easy film, or a feel good film. It is difficult and distressing and confusing. I hope it becomes a classic. I hope teachers show it to children in the classroom and let them ask difficult questions.

The visual image we are given of this terrible yet necessary journey, is Monster Island, populated by creatures representing various aspects of emotion. The emotions are raw, powerful and in conflict, and so are the creatures, each formed from amalgams of different animals.

The important thing to remember in this film, is that the boy does not go anywhere—this is not the Neverending Story, this is the adult version of the Wizard of Oz. Carol, and Ira and Judith and all the rest are parts of the boy’s psyche that he is trying to sort out. It is wild, and chaotic and traumatic and painful, and terribly frightening. And along with individuating, the boy has to contend with reconciling his wild animal nature with his humanness and social nature.

There really is nothing brief to say about this film. I would say, if you watch one film from 2009, watch this one. If you are only going to watch two films from 2009, watch this one twice.

*

I have noticed a trend in the last decade, in childrens films, that there is an increasing criticism of modern life, and a growing theme of ecological realities. As well, I have noticed a re-embracing of the warmest sense of our Darwinian nature—that we are primates, an animal, on one branch of a tree connected to all the other animals in the world. We are no masters of the world, despite our destructive capabilities, and we are hardly stewards either. It remains to be seen whether these informing myths of our modern age will shape the direction our children go in, but the truth remains, animals find their niche within the greater biosphere, or else they vanish. We are wild animals; I wish we could accept that as good enough.

into the magic shadows

I often think of writing movie articles; not necessarily reviews of recent movies, but reflections on movies past. But then it seems weird one week to write "egad, the sky is falling" and the next week to write, "don't you just love the "Secret of Nimh?"

I think too, that in my darker moments, when depression grips me, and my inner world is more terrible than anything going on in the real world, that i often cling to film, the comfort of past favorites, or looking forward to upcoming flics--and it keeps me going.

It gets me thinking that this is really weird, and maybe symptomatic of the same ostrich behaviour i piss and moan about in others. On the one hand, i feel desperately anxious about things in the world, and deeply troubled over what i ought be doing. On the other hand, i take deepest delight in film. My soul is overtaken by whimsy and I launch into retro film fests by myself, and I get giddy with excitement about new magicks coming down the pipeline.

Like, for example, i am so very excited that there is a new Sylvain Chomet film just about ready(The Illusionist, no relation to the other recent film of same title). it titillates me so much that it momentarily relieves me of overarching anxieties about goings on in the world.

The weird guilt feeling that arose moments before writing this, came from thinking about the juxtaposition of feelings, and realizing that even if the world, civilization, or maybe my and the human race's future might all be swirling in a black vortex, at least I get to take joy in the land of magic shadows.

I was reading a 'top 50' animated films of all time list, and just basking in the memories, luxuriating in the strange worlds they created for me, and thinking about what magical creations we come up with. These films made me forget some unpleasant feelings from earlier this evening when I was studying for my exam and thinking about issues relating to population, and how irresolvable emissions issues are simply because of how many of us there are, and even if we stopped burning oil, we would keep burning something to cook food and heat homes.

Many of my favorite animated films have held deeply political, social and ecological messages. Thinking about the popularity of these films, and their messages, I question the value of narrative at all. Its like we have so much narrative that it doesn't shape us at all, only offers us momentary distraction, But I do feel so very moved by film, and especially by the "cartoons" I have watched. I feel they have helped shape this primate in such distinct ways over the years.

So, I will be posting a few relevant words about my favorite animated films in the near future. And I will forgo trying to relavitize them to our present circumstances, even though that would be easy enough. Instead, I look to how they struck in the first place.

The Mind versus Hollywood

I saw 2012 on its opening weekend, and would like to talk about it as though it mattered.

I like most of the Big Dumb Films that pass through the theatres. Aside from being moved by the spectacle (the most prominent aspect determining box-office appeal), I am often quite taken by the streamlined mythic stories, the over-blown emotional hooks and primal response to danger. and i love that wondrous focus that comes during crisis.

Given revenue, it’s safe to say, most everyone feels the same. There are genres within this genre. Michael Bay likes heroes saving the day and confrontation. Roland Emmerich likes the ordinary guy being called upon and being driven by his love of family. Stuff being destroyed is not enough for me, I am a sucker for the Emmerich Brand of Boom-Boom.

But I am disturbed by the stories I am being fed in these emotional roller-coasters.

I want you to imagine a no-holds-barred cage match. The goal is the shaping of your perceptions, the prize is no less than your decision making capacities.

I propose the environment academic, Thomas Homer-Dixon versus Roland Emmerich. What? Ok. I accept your contention that this is not a fair match.

To preserve fairness, I recommend forming a team against Emmerich. Due to the celluloid power of Emmerich, we’ll create an opposing team of intellectuals and writers including Paul Ehrlich, Richard Heinberg, Andrew Weaver, James Howard Kunstler, Jeff Rubin, David Suzuki even Al Gore. . .and I am allowing as trainers, Rachel Carson, James Lovelock, Colin Campbell, M. King Hubbert, Bill McKibben, Matthew Simmons, Jacques Ellul and Neil Postman. In the continuing spirit of fairness, I allow you to add 3 persons (who work in the idea sector/written medium) to the team or the team trainers. Keep in mind, we are only choosing between popular thinkers, who might be said to be relatively well known. Obscure academics are not welcome at the audition, no matter their expertise, because they reach too few people.

Now we have an A-Team versus Emmerich. Given the enormous team pitted against singular Emmerich, where do you place your bets for the prize? Remember the prize is decision making influence in the individual.

Stats
Medium: A-Team: written word; Emmerich: film.
Environment: A-Team: better bookstores everywhere, academic databases. Emmerich: theatres, television sets, video stores, drugstores, corner stores, department stores, occasional gas stations. Depending on where you live, also alleyways and dumpling stands.
Audience: A-Team: discerning readers already concerned by world affairs. Emmerich: Everyone, including the opponents audience.
Audience size: A-Team: 10’s of thousands. Emmerich: 100’s of millions, perhaps billions.
Handicaps: A-Team: the illiterate, the apathetic, the uneducated, the poor, the busy. Emmerich: the blind.
Method of Engagement: A-Team: argument, logical thought, historical analysis. Emmerich: metaphor, allusion, sensory overstimulation, emotional engagement.
Emotional production: A-Team: anxiety, fear, futility. Emmerich: Hope. Relief.
Audience requirement: A-Team: Literacy, motivation, patience, logic, determination, bravery, background education. Emmerich: Eyes. Ears.

I won't trouble you with the massacre that occurred in the cage.

Popcorn aside, I brought us this blood bath to demonstrate the difference in power between the message heralders. Now assuming a victor in reach and influence, what is Emmerich communicating?

When you let that ten bucks slip from your sweaty hands, you expect the film to breach all the laws of physics and common sense. You expect it to be melodramatic. You expect nothing related to reality. But, what you bring into the darkened room is your most accessible, malleable self. Your vanguards are off behind the theatre, smoking. You are all alone in there being saturated in “truths” within the story. The most powerful truths are the ones you don’t even think about.

2012, like all good disaster movies channels our anxieties. We were anxious about atomic energy and got giant ants, spiders and rabbits. We were anxious about communism and we got Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We were anxious about population and we got Soylent Green, and Population Zero. We were anxious about computers and we got 2001, The Terminator and the Matrix. Now, we are anxious about environmental destruction, and catastrophic climate change and, among others, we have 2012.

Leaving aside the emotional safety valve granted--that the destruction defined in the film is not our fault--we are still left trying to cope. The film has a protagonist narrator and a hero and a villain. It is these latter two characters and the forces they represent that I am concerned about.

The hero, a scientist, suffers misgivings throughout the film about the cold nature of lifeboat ethics. The villain, a generic political person, is narrowly focused on the goal of averting the extinction of the human race.

The scientist, in a baldfaced contradiction of the cold lucidity of science, expresses all of our warm fuzz feelings about including everyone and pursuing what everyone wants. The politico sets aside his emotions looking instead to the pragmatic concerns of how much can be saved, what actually has a future.

So, we have a kind of reversal. Politicians normally spend a lot of time barking whatever they feel will keep the most voters happy, and scientists normally have the gloomy position of crunching the numbers and thinking about tomorrow.

These two mindsets go to battle against one another in the climax of the film. It’s a nonsensical mess. The hero-scientist keeps railing about what is fair and not fair, and pushing to do nice wishful things. The villain-politician, remains steadfast and sticks to what will work, what will achieve results, what will in fact offer them some hope. The cast and audience cheer when he is defeated by the scientist and his emotionally moved sympathizers. If we take the “facts” in the story at face value, the scientist has doomed them. And he has doomed them for a reason that would never occur in reality. Scientists don’t believe you should put 400 people on a boat that can sustain 100. THEY KEEP TELLING US THIS IN THE REAL WORLD.

And this is only the little illusion snuck into our subconscious.

Out in the real world, scientists keep telling us that we are courting disaster of a magnitude beyond our imagining(kind of like the neutrino fed destruction in the film). They warn us that there will be no technological solutions and that we, and perhaps everything else(like kittens and tulips and baby seals) may be overwhelmed. They keep telling us if we don't make radical changes, there is no way we will cope with what is to come. Sheesh, what a bummer. What can Emmerich ‘teach’ us in the face of this foul tasting message?

Again, taking conditions of the film matter-of-factly, the earth heats up, tectonic chaos ensues. Earthquakes, volcanic activity and crustal breakups encircle the planet. Well, that's scary; what will we do?

Well, we’ll build Arks and in just 27 days, we will emerge and find Eden in a raised up continent of Africa. Human ingenuity and technology swoop down in the nick of time and save us from that nagging anxiety we are all living with. There is no sulphur poisoned atmosphere, no boiled away oceans, no multi-year ash winter killing off all life. There is the human-exceptionalism triumph. We the audience are rewarded for enduring the distress of the destruction.

So, why does this bug me? Why my stupid cage match?

We are in a moment in history where decisions are being made about how to respond to things that effect everyone and everything in unimaginable ways. There is already endless confusion among people.

People will shy away from uncomfortable truths if they are offered shelters.

What I am saying, is it does not matter that even though the thickest numb-nut recognizes that blockbusters are ridiculous nonsense, the message in the story still sinks in. The mind rejects the silly notion of the sun flare neutrino mumbo jumbo clocking our pretty planet. But once we are inside the story, the human story just flows uninhibited into our psyches.

We are presented with the righteousness of wishful thinking, the condemnation of hard decisions and sacrifice, and complete salvation offered to human ingenuity no matter what.

There is an ocean of smart clear thinking people trying desperately to get our attention and convince us to think about complex things, behave like real citizens and give up comforts that we are badly addicted to. And there are a handful of story weavers, who massage our consciences and comfort our fears with fairy tale endings. Engaging with the thinkers requires bravery, intelligence, distress and action. Engaging with the story tellers is as easy as breathing and allows comfort and inaction.

I am a mythopoetic soul, and value the power of narrative to instruct us. But there are evil stories that intoxicate us so we can’t see clearly and my real heroes don’t seem to stand a chance against them.