Memo to Michael Bay: GI JOE KICKS YOUR ASS!

Superheroes with toy franchise tie-ins get a lot of heat... unless critics had a real lively sense of humor they trashed both TRANSFORMERS (as well as WOLVERINE, TERMINATOR SALVATION, etc.) but GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA does everything right. AND it gets a lot less things wrong. One can only hope the Michael Bays, Brett Ratners and McGs pay attention when watching JOE (though its director, Stephen Sommers, certainly has some crap under his belt, such as VAN HELSING). Here's some things they might look for:

1) DEADPAN: The key, as with the best John Carpenter films, is the universal Deadpan: Just compare Channing Tatum, first-rate in his second-rateness as the "Most American" Joe" to, say, the comedic everyspazzisms of (Tatum's real life friend) Shia LaBeouf in TRANSFORMERS, and why is Tatum so good? Because he scraps the winks and wails, and underplays! Ditto the amazing Sienna Miller. When these two are together, sparks fly because they don't! (Bay would show literal sparks, probably coming out of someone's ass)

2) RACE: There's a lot less racial "consciousness" and more of a racial celebration in JOE. For one thing, the main black character--Marlon Wayans in JOE's case--is actually given a personality beyond the carefully compiled compendium of "safe" cliches that make most token black characters so invisible (i.e. they're loyal and don't interrupt when their white friends are talking). Instead he's allowed to have a genuinely ballsy "take charge" persona as well as sensitivity. He knows when to move in and when to back off in his amorous pursuits of this fellow Joe chick who is... white! She ain't blond (her dyed red hair could denote some ghetto roots), but hey, Sen. Strom, baby steps.

3) RELATIONSHIP DYNAMICS: JOE takes a a page from Joss Whedon's BUFFY to see how relationships and events in "normal" life can reverberate to a larger mythic canvas. The Baroness turned evil because Joe couldn't face her at her brother's funeral (he just drove by on his badass motorcycle in the Arlington cemetery rain, etc. etc.) Rather than some drab "You killed my father" "But I AM your father" bit of linear by-the-portable-Jung cliche, we zoom back and forth from the present Bondian crisis to past traumas, most of which develop character AND expend firepower.

4) COMPLEXLY MOTIVATED VILLAINS: They all "fell" from grace at some point, and they mouth their bad dialogue in that rarest of styles: the selfless straightforward, not wincing or mincing when their dialogue clunks to the floor. One is a Halliburton-style industrialist, another a deformed mad scientist type (BRICK's Joseph Gordon Hewitt!) and another a self-centered ninja still harboring a grudge against his little white adopted and better-at-kung fu brother who blew up his spot at kung fu school (Nothing it turns out, is cuter than two little tykes wailing kung fu on each other in a Chinese kitchen flashback - with cleavers!).

5) COMPETENT EDITING: No matter what's going on in JOE, you can follow it. The edits are tight but not whiplash insane or Bay-level insecure, or shredded down to meaninglessness as in the disappointing QUANTUM OF SOLACE. There's a trust in the thrust of the story to override the sugar-addict guitar pick whittling style of so many current action films, which aren't happy unless they're cross cutting by nanosecond between 18 different incomprehensible and overly loud set pieces. More than anything, JOE's ingenious editing strategies remind me of the good early Hong Kong action films like MADAME CITY HUNTER and SUPERCOP 2!

Lastly, JOE manages to involve character arcs and development that for once are NOT cliches, because they connect to the truth...truths of being a tough, rough, heart of gold military type (they remind me of some very cool rangers I know) as opposed to a kid who is a "hero" based on his ability to own a possessed sports car or play a video game. While Michael Bay is spending millions on CGI to make a giant robot dance around like a spazz to bad top 40 rock, JOE is smashing up cars in Paris while flashing back to proposing to his girl (now the hot leather badass villain known as Baroness!) all without the requisite bullshit throwaway gags and punch lines. In short, all while keeping a completely straight face! It ain't been this good since STARSHIP TROOPERS or, another classic JOE reminded me of, the Sam Hodges' 1980 FLASH GORDON!

Like TROOPERS, JOE does the atom-splitting antithetical dichotomy bit, turning the CGI military spectacle into into both an effective critique of the military-industrial complex AND a veritable Sears catalog worth of cool new deadly stuff for sale! If the future is even half this rad, I'm glad I'm still alive to watch it happen... later, when it comes on DVD... and blu-ray! And did I mention Dennis Quaid as the leader of his beloved Joes? Shit son, there ain't even a foul-mouthed robot or annoying anthem rock songs to fuck this up. I'm not saying Channing Tatum is the new Vin Diesel, but if even if he's just the new Scott Walker, the sleeping 15-year old boy in all of us can finally wake up and look unashamed into the draft board future. Ride on, big Joes. Ride on...

Bright Lights issue 66 now online

Issue 66 of Bright Lights Film Journal is now online.

From the editor

Keep watching the lights...

Articles

Roman Polanski: What's on Trial?
By Karin Luisa Badt

Looking at Charlie: Modern Times
An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
"Buck up! Never say die! We’ll get along!"
By Alan Vanneman

Past Sunset: Noir in the West
"I don't need other people. I don't need help. I can take care of me."
By Imogen Sara Smith

On the Escarpment, Off the Escarpment: It Helps When the Love Is Strong
Especially when the lovers aren't
By D. J. M. Saunders

Porno to the People: The Danish Revolution That Liberated America
"Tease was out, honesty was in."
By Jack Stevenson

The Dead Things We Already Are: Pod People, Body Snatching, and the Horrors of Business as Usual
"We keep returning to this story about pod people because we're terrified of the continuing erosion of our physicality in the postmodern era."
By Jesse Stommel

The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover: Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover
How a movie exposé of "abuse of power" defends those in power and their institutions
By Jay Rothermel

Contagious Homosexuality: Cruising and Sodom and Gomorrah
"In both Sodom and Gomorrah and Cruising, homosexuality — and its alternate currents — is caught with a glance."
By Rob Faunce

Can't Repeat the Past? Of Course You Can't — and Shouldn't
Filming The Great Gatsby in the 21st Century
By Suzanne del Gizzo

Blake Edwards vs. Hollywood: Sunset and the Myth of Hollywood's Golden Age
A tour of Edwards' curious 1988 film, with side trips to variations by James Ivory, John Schlesinger, and others
By Barry Wurst II

Actors

Delphine Seyrig: The Eternal Return
"Seyrig is capable of stopping an entire film with one decisive physical gesture, one smile, one glare, one sound from her smoky, murmuring voice."
By Dan Callahan

Sean Connery: A "Natural Thrust"
"Connery, never a martyr to false modesty, remains as voluble and combative as ever."
By Christopher Sandford

Directors

Just Say Oui: An Interview with the Yes Men
"I'm shitting bricks, thinking he's onto me."
By Damon Smith

Film and Film and Film: An Interview with Jonas Mekas
"One who knows how to, as they say, 'read' the images, can tell everything about me."
By Jon Lanthier

Columns

Bright Sights: Play Time, Gaumont Treasures, Diary for My Children, Winstanley, Marlene, Bill Douglas Trilogy
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
By Gordon Thomas

Letter from New York (c. 1980)
"The problem is other people — crazy people."
By Howard Mandelbaum

Movies

Film Kills: Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 1
"Tarantino thus concedes some of his omnipotence to the medium he so deftly manipulates."
By Vlad Dima

"Do You Find Me Sadistic?" Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 2
"This is the World War II film confronting its Jungian shadow, acknowledging its darkest impulses and finally purging them."
By Lee Weston Sabo

Of Perfect Plans and Acts of Creation: Stanley Kubrick's The Killing
"His plan mirrors Johnny's, that is, pieces of the plan are known to one person: Johnny and Stanley; and not until the end do we see most of their pieces come into place.""
By Robert Castle

Critical Distance: What Knowing Knows About 9/11
"Where Cloverfield provocatively blurs the line between being 'about' 9/11 and being (mere) entertainment, Knowing lands squarely in the latter camp."
By Devan Goldstein

Playing It Safe with John Dillinger: Michael Mann's Public Enemies
"Dillinger had recently undergone plastic surgery to alter his face and to try to remove his fingerprints. But Public Enemies does not dare to depict that kind of desperation and that determination to survive under any circumstances."
By Joan McGettigan

"They Come in Peace": Andy Fickman's Race to Witch Mountain
"Only saviors can save polluted planets, yellow cab drivers are losers . . ."
By Jay Rothermel

Far from Elementary: Debra Chasnoff's Straightlaced: How Gender's Got Us All Tied Up
"I told him, 'I'm not gay. My neck was cold.'"
By Gary Morris

Festivals

After the Surge: The 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival
"An alternative agenda for the festival might be: what can we make of modernism?"
By Lesley Chow

Bucking the Tide: The 2009 New York Film Festival
This year's strong, idiosyncratic line-up reminds us that moviegoing can still be more than "a museum experience"
By Megan Ratner

Lucky 13: The 2009 Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
Getting out of the ghetto
By Gary Morris

From Air Dolls to the Anchorage: The 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival
"VIFF remains the unspoiled oasis for cinephiles looking to get away from it all."
By Ben Cho

Books

In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, by Chris Welles Feder.
By Joseph McBride

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, edited by Robert Politot
By Jon Lanthier

America’s Film Vault: A Reference Guide to the Motion Pictures Held by the U.S. National Archives, by Phillip W. Stewart
By Matthew Kennedy

Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor, by Dan North
By Deborah Allison

Have a Blaisdell Halloween!

Paul Blaisdell (July 21, 1927 - July 10, 1983) was a science fiction illustrator (The Ant Men, above), a special effects artisan, and an inspired designer of imaginative costumes and props for a series of low-budget horror, monster, and sci-fi films released by American International Pictures and Allied Artists in the 1950s. He was the King of Rubber-Suit Monster Creators, making and often performing inside such creations as The Beast With a Million Eyes, the three-eyed mutant in Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended, The She-Creature, Voodoo Woman, the little saucermen in Invasion of the Saucer Men (with Blaisdell, left), the cave-dwelling Venusian in Corman's It Conquered the World (below, right), the tree creature in From Hell it Came, the umbrella creature and other extraterrestrial organisms of Not of This Earth, the horror masks of How to Make a Monster, and - most memorably of all - the rampaging alien in the spaceship of Edward L. Cahn's It! the Terror From Beyond Space (above), a film which many claim was the inspiration for Ridley Scott's Alien.

You could always recognize a Blaisdell creation. There was something simultaneously comical and disturbing about Blaisdell's monsters, something weirdly familiar that grabbed the viewer's unconscious and wouldn't let go. Something in that odd latex texture. Something in those alien eyes. Even Blaisdell's props - like the tools used by the little saucermen to repair their spaceship - had a distinctive character.

In the 1960s, Blaisdell was a founder of, and occasional contributor to, Fantastic Monsters of the Films, a magazine which rivaled and occasionally surpassed the Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine created by Blaisdell's former agent, Forrest J Ackerman. (Almost all the Fantastic Monsters covers were photos of Blaisdell monsters.)

The magazine failed. Blaisdell died prematurely. Had he lived longer, he would have seen himself lionized at horror and sci-fi conventions as the genuine star that he was. To read more about Blaisdell, click here.

An Atheist's Guide to "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer. –Stevie Wonder

In 1949 Walt Disney Studios produced the last, and arguably the best, of their “package” films – barely-feature length vignette collections made on reduced budgets during World War II for theatrical distribution – though the dyad of animated novellas included are improved little by their seemingly haphazard juxtaposition. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, featuring the shorts “The Wind In the Willows” (which in turn inspired quite possibly the most demented dark ride in theme park history) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” has since been rightfully canonized due to its ubiquity in television programming and perennial presence on home video. I remember lucidly the withered VHS sleeves of my family’s first copies (in the 80’s Disney gave each of the shorts its own separate video cartridge and retail price), particularly of “The Wind in the Willows”: I was never enamored of Kenneth Grahame’s bucolic text, but the sight of anthropomorphic rodents and amphibians gulping down foamy pints of ale (a substance with a menacingly alien allure to this youngster) was the stuff of summer daydreams.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” however, was something different altogether – a half-feverish, half-jokey ode to common sense and harvest culture inspired by Washington Irving’s profoundly sterile folktale. As was, I can only assume, customary in many other early 90’s middle-American households, my parents would include “Sleepy Hollow” in a Halloween night round-up of child-friendly entertainment also including the Our Gang short “Spooky Hooky” and the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence from Fantasia (among other even more benign snippets). It was always the highlight of the evening for me, much more so than the acquisition of candy (I was born, alas, with a gastric aversion to sugar) or the jack-o-lantern carving (I could never stand to dirty my hands with squash entrails) or the stressful role-playing involved in donning costumes. The invocation of spirits, however (and later, as I was to discover, the imbibement of same) always struck me as the real deal, even if it was depicted playfully – as it is in another of my favorite cartoons, the Disney Silly Symphony “Skeleton Dance,” which rather joyously refracts the grim desolation of sepulcher motifs through the giddily kinesthetic mirror of human anatomy. Even odder still is that this fascination has stuck with me through my conversion to anti-transcendentalism, though the two predilections may go hand in hand: Examining the concept of Hell, for example, is not likely to entertain anyone who genuinely believes that their soul is in continual risk of eternal damnation. Those who lack belief are free to wallow in the sinister details.

There’s a historical piquancy to superstition and the occult as well, particularly when one considers how pervasive such belief systems were fairly recently (and admittedly, still are, in certain parts of the world), even in the United States. Hawthorne, for example, claimed to have been haunted by the ghoulish “heritage” of American ignorance – particularly the crescendo it reached in Salem, Massachusetts. And the diabolically educational elements of “spook” culture form a significant part of the success of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. Set in colonial New York – in a landscape awash with vibrant, autumnal hues that adeptly suggest the richening of more subtle, vernal colors – the film is as much a caricature of its milieu as any other cartoon period piece, but it effectively and accurately depicts our childish expectations of Dutch-settled New England in an artfully grotesque manner (think Longfellow, who reads easier as transcribed archetype than as poetry). And delightfully mucking up the pastoral painting feel are big band songs from Bing Crosby, which seem to have stepped in from another era entirely to rape the proceedings with marvelously complex 6th chords, and the vividly exaggerated characters – Ichabod Crane himself, with a beaky nose, lanky stature and voluminous appetite quite befitting an itinerant, small town pedagogue (rendered with an impeccable mix of sympathy and ridicule by animator Ollie Johnston); the beefy, tanned-skinned sexual bully Brom Bones with his Davy Crockett-esque coonskin cap; and the ruddy, complacently plump farm baron Balthus Van Tassel, whose daughter Ichabod woos (to Brom Bones' intense chagrin) with sensitive, epicene gusto for the first half of the running time.



As with most Disney productions, all the sex has been expertly drained from the relationships. Ichabod’s interest in Katrina Van Tassel is predominantly financial and comically gustatory (the teacher trolls around town absent-mindedly for a great deal of the short, evading trouble in a Mr. Magoo-ish fashion while managing to schlep every piece of available food in sight), and despite Katrina’s formidable bust and petticoat-laden coquettishness we can’t even imagine Brom Bones nailing her: She’s more china doll than woman, and probably the film’s least interest aspect. Most of the other females, meanwhile, are inflicted with garish imperfections to accentuate Katrina’s putatively ideal form: Ichabod gives singing lessons to an illustrious trio with a potbelly, bulbous nose and curiously asymmetrical face between them. But while these visual gags are an insincere departure from the source material (and a distracting one, especially when the headless horseman arrives and the animators ameliorate his intimidating features with a buffoonish barrage of slapstick), the asexuality isn’t, necessarily – Irving treats the inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow as colonial entrepreneurs as much as narrative cast-members, and it’s not until after Ichabod visits the Von Tassel mansion in the text that his heart flutters uncontrollably. Disney explicitly depicts the metaphorical fields of gold from the paragraph below in Ichabod’s fantasies:

“[A]s he rolled his great green eyes over the fat meadow-lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchards burthened with ruddy fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness. Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children…”




It’s intriguing how Ichabod’s mental path swerves directly from real estate to progeny without any intimacy as linkage (and it’s equally funny how in the preceding, unquoted paragraph, his dreams all involve the gourmet cooking of livestock, described with the only language in the entire novella that could be considered sensual). How distant is this, though, from the impotent family values in most Disney films, promoting the nobility of contributing to American industry while saving time for wholesome domesticity? Still, reinforcing the benign ideals of family life are not quite the same as aspiring to predatorily insert one’s self into a handsomely wealthy lineage (near to the American dream as it may be), and it’s seemingly for this reckless desire that Irving “punishes” Ichabod with the Headless Horseman in the original story. It’s implied that Katrina bursts Ichabod’s bubble of grandeur at the harvest shin-dig and, having violated the delicate balance of the Crane-Bones-Van Tassel love triangle with a direct proposal, he’s sent away penniless, only to have his sorrow fed upon by a decapitated rider.

This is the most notable alteration in the animated adaptation – while we view Ichabod’s ignoble intentions with a laugh (it occurs to me that they’re even less respectable than simple lust would be), the connection between his desire for Katrina and his run-in with the horseman is not sturdy enough for us to assume a causal relationship. Instead, Disney intervenes with a characteristic dash of old world Gnosticism that wildly improves both the story and its spiritual significance: Ichabod Crane’s gullibility. It’s ham-handedly introduced – before Brom Bones sings the “Headless Horseman” number Bing Crosby’s narratiahon simply tells us that Ichabod believes in ghosts without any foreshadowing before it whatsoever, and it’s one of those odd, tell-tale seams in classic animation that reveal the handprints of multiple script writers and drafts (not to mention, very likely, the influence of coffee-and-cigarette fueled arguments about proper narrative direction). But in a way we relish being heaved down Disney’s rabbit hole so brusquely, because what follows not only enchants all the preceding content in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” – it also includes eight of the most accomplished minutes in animation history.



The “Headless Horseman” musical number is a dense pocket of Disney brilliance, a collaborative effort aligning the inimitable talents of several men while maintaining an impeccable cohesion: We never lose sight of the fact that we’re listening to Brom Bones – outlined with incandescent yellow from the furnace behind him – attempting to scare Ichabod Crane out of Sleepy Hollow so he can wed and bed Katrina himself. Wolfgang Reitherman lent his sense of spatial fluidity while Milt Kahl, Ollie Johnston and Ward Kimball allow a wealth of dissonant emotions to populate Van Tassel’s living room (Katrina’s amusement, Ichabod’s mounting trepidation). Likewise, the diversity of visual and aural influences littered about the screen and soundtrack is staggering: The scene encompasses Dixieland, Boris Karloff, Albrecht Durer, bandstand jazz, Edgar Allen Poe (or, more accurately, wood carved illustrations of his tales), and John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (below), just to name a few. The result is a story within a story (Brom Bones “elucidates” the tale of the Headless Horseman) depicted with horrifically makeshift illustrations (Brom rides a wooden chair towards Ichabod casting ominous shadows, a startled cat shrieks and darts into a hollow pumpkin, a window flies open letting in the grave solemnity of the dimming woods, and so forth). The effect is such that despite the distancing nature of the stylized animation we feel very close to the action – the scene is directed half at Ichabod and half at “the camera,” assuming Ichabod’s isolated, “alien” POV in relation to the remainder of the community who offer vocal accompaniment to Bones’ tune – and it’s though we’re imagining these images while being read to, and Disney’s animators are simply splashing them onto cels as they soar from our brains.





The balladic nature of the song (it actually resembles the corrido form structurally, concentrating on a single character’s history and attributes instead of detailing a coherent narrative), written by Don Rage and Gene De Paul and sung in Bing Crosby’s campily inappropriate, genteel baritone, allows for another important change to the driving motivations of “Sleepy Hollow”. In the original text it’s not entirely clear what the Headless Horseman wants, aside from corporeal revenge for his present state, and in the legend itself the horseman is described as carrying his severed head like talisman wherever he goes. In the cartoon, however, the need for violence is rooted in more practical matters. While he does indeed still “[hold] his noggin’ in his hand,” the Horseman’s fellow ghouls aren’t all that fond of his appearance. Thus, “With a hip-hip and a clippity-clop / He's out looking for a head to swap / So don't try to figure out a plan / You can't reason with a headless man”. Indeed, Brom suggests that the only logical course of action to take should one encounter the Horseman is to cross the bridge out of Sleepy Hollow – on the other side of which the specter has no power (it appears that, as with most tenets of meticulous transcendental hierarchies, even the undead have their limitations).

The final sequences of “Sleepy Hollow” are laced with tenebrous misunderstanding – after leaving the Von Tassel household, Ichabod’s mind is wiped clean of his connubial aspirations as he rides his mule into an oneiric forest where frogs and ferns seem to lugubriously whisper his name. These scenes are quite funny, but there’s a fierce sense of hopelessness behind them: Ichabod’s trust in misleading empirical data, influenced by the fabulism of rivals, is his undoing, rather than his arrogance or opportunistic intentions. The confrontation between Ichabod and the Headless Horseman should be less gag-laden than it is, but the attention to detail – the fuming nostrils of the Plutonian steed, the Horseman’s lacking of even a neck, and the headlong hurling of the flaming pumpkin through the bridge/vortex at the scene’s close – confirms the reality of the Horseman (at least in Ichabod’s mind) in startlingly subtle ways. The narration indulges in omniscient, free-indirect discourse for the majority of the film (the only primary head we don’t crack is Katrina’s), but the “Headless Horseman” musical number represents an unexpected shift, after which we're lost in the confused corridors of Ichabod’s brain. Until the last few seconds of the film, we are Ichabod, and it’s terrifying; not only because of what Ichabod sees and is victimized by but because of what he believes.



The lyric “You can’t reason with a headless man” turns out to be crucial. While the Horseman has been decapitated, his search for a new head is the most practical goal in the entire picture, as well as the one with the most existential urgency: Until he finds a skull and brain the Headless Horseman isn’t even a legitimate entity, he’s a personified objective. Ichabod, on the other hand, is totally lacking in the “reason” that might help him win Katrina more expediently – he’s not only an easy-to-mock woolgatherer but a believer in spiritualist folly that makes his universe impossibly hazardous (indeed, what the superstitious receive in exchange for sensibility is the comforting promise that arbitrary rituals – such as the spilled salt Ichabod tosses over his shoulder – will protect them). Brom Bones chooses an ironically fitting ghost with which to frighten Ichabod, because the teacher’s occultist vulnerabilities prove that he, too, is headless – far more so than his antagonist, whose pragmatism, subdued eroticism and mercantilist economic outlook (there’s a finite number of perfect heads out there, right?) make him the model American citizen. Ichabod is, by comparison, a eunuch – a stork-like man pecking his way through the trials and troubles of life.

While Irving’s Ichabod Crane embodies a firmer moral, one steeped in a classically frontier-American sense of chivalric propriety, Disney’s Ichabod propounds a far more useful (and a far more modern) message – the relevance of which extends far beyond love triangles encircling the lustless courtship of old money. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a cautionary tale of belief, of the dangers of faith that hinders our success, and it’s likely the only one of its kind to be found in the slush of mainstream family animation. But wryly grinning at us from every shattered pumpkin and every bale of hay is also a fascinating study of how aesthetically satisfying the pageantry of superstition can be – which, perversely, is the primary contribution “Sleepy Hollow” has made to film culture. In the Tim Burton remake, the veracity of the Horseman’s existence is never in question, and Ichabod is played more as a nebbish techie than a Yankee Doodle-ish ladies man with a formidable Achilles heel. Most viewers remember, above all else, the odd appearance of the cartooned schoolteacher, and his knee-knocking fear, and yet what enables the ride of the Headless Horseman in the first place is an irrational trust in fiction – in fiction once tendentiously treated as fact. If only the transition from the fact of today to the fiction were tomorrow were smoother, we might not all feel so headless, galloping through dark, snowy woods with miles to go before we sleep.

The Beautiful and the Darned: Avenging TWILIGHT

It's massively popular, it's ridiculously mopey, yet it's also brooding, purple and relatively un-headache-inducing... in short, it's everything you hate and love about Seattle if you ever tried to move there. TWILIGHT captures the "real" version of the icy self-importance that suffuses the locals, as opposed to the foggy eccentricites of, say, TWIN PEAKS...it celebrates alienation, emotional distance and the ability to suppress darker instincts... and youth oriented product positioning!

I haven't read the TWILIGHT books but that doesn't mean I can't comment on the movie... plus, that Kristen Stewart is a little flannel-wearing hottie with a brain ("Earlier this month, Stewart was made to clarify some comments that she made about fans of the vampire romance, after calling them “f**king psychotic” in an interview.) and I love that her character, Bella, is not humiliated and bullied on her first day of school in a strange new town, or ostracized in the lunchroom, or saddled with a John Hughes-esque geek as her only friend. She's hot in the context of the movie, so every clique in the school is vying for her membership, just as it would be in real life. And I like that she's a legitimately weird, dark character.. boys are important, but sulky poetry and drawings in her notebook are as well.

Then there's the Ed Cullen, I mean Robert Pattinson. Well, who cares? He's a dreamboat who wears white pancake make-up like a pro and can brood well and I dig that Bella keeps her virginity and it's all a big mopey deal. Like BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER without Buffy, or Zoe Bell's stuntwork, or laughs, or good writing. But at least the scenery matches the clothes! And Robert Pattinson is better at being ANGEL than David Boreanz. God, I couldn't stand Boreanz, no offense to the man, it was mainly the hair and the poseur quality. Pattinson walks a thin rope over the pit of adolescent pretentious/narcissism (which most of the WB network falls into) and never slips. TWILIGHT works because it pays barely any attention to the tropes expected by the slavering fanboys. It's a chick flick in a very real sense of the word... all it's missing, really, are more horses. Are there horses in it? I can't remember. Hell, our dopey hero only drinks day old animal blood instead of humans, the vampire equivalent of a promise ring.

Also, more than the homey shire or Hogwart's or Sunnydale, TWILIGHT's locale manages to be both fantastical and actually real-- a genuine geographic destination, one soothing in its misty purple mountain majesty - the Pacific Northwest. In this sense TWILIGHT is like the scene when Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak wander through the redwoods in VERTIGO, stretched to three hours and what the hell is wrong with that? Everything of course, if you consider VERTIGO to be a terribly overrated bore. (I don't, but I used to).

So why does TWILIGHT draw the simmering hate from the bad boy blogosphere? Is it a reminder that we're all not Robert Pattinson or 13 year old girls? And why is an old reprobate like me netflixing it and getting drawn into the swoony virgin pining of it? Because I recently noticed that if a young cute innocent girl can learn to enjoy movies clearly meant for boys and men (war, gore, superheroes, Japanese "pink" movies, bimbo-thons, etc.) then we older men should at least try and do the same for teenage chick flick vamp movies. Plus, I follow the Carol Clover model of the "viewer" as beyond the dualities of age and gender and am on speaking terms with my inner 16-year old girl). Why am I even justifying this to you? My GOD! Kristen Bell is so cute.

TWILIGHT it must be remembered, has nothing to do with "real" high school or "real" horror films - it's a fantasia of maturity deferment; a snapshot of how pregnant with dangerous, giddy possibility the world seems before one gets their first "bite" - it's permanently frozen at the moment of rapture right before the disillusionment of the first sexual experience with a guy who promises you the world, then splits. The idea of an ageless vampire here becomes an excuse for the eternal virgin pre-pubescence; an eternity dwelling at the edge of the cliff that all your friends are now beginning to dive off of (and looking kind of busted when they resurface, if they ever do).

Aren't movies primarily vehicles for escape? In the case of TWILIGHT, what the girl demographic is escaping from is their own wooden stake penetration, the pink dawn of the mighty cock. Who can blame them? I remember my revulsion at seeing hairy 1970s porn magazines being circulated in elementary school. Could people really be doing these things with their... potty holes? It seemed unsanitary, violent and most of all, painful.

What eased the fear of maturing into such a dirty werewolf? Pamela Sue Martin as TV's NANCY DREW, Kate Jackson in CHARLIE'S ANGELS... TV, in short, the promise of an eternity of hand-holding and chaste confessions of love and adoration, as opposed to a humiliating orifice merger. Perhaps the TWILIGHT haters are undersexed, and if so, why? Self-sabotage? Unrealistic expectations? Could it be that the answer is right there in Kristen Stewart's dazzling pout? Sex is some scary shit and it's easy to long for what you can't get easily. It's when you're ultra-hot that it becomes an outright menace. Far better to play out of your league, then sulk back to the DVD player when you don't hit a home run. That way you never have to face the fact that you dread your own desires.

But haters needn't worry. The immense popularity of the series all but automatically ensures it wont last. The bigger the rise the faster the plummet once the demographic grows up and into college. But the lovers needn't worry either; if we survive past 2030, there's bound to be a wave of nostalgia--TWILIGHT-mania--with a few thousand stalwart troupers still rolling out for the semi-annual convention. Comics, souvenir programmes, and probably Pattinson--toothless and hungover--in a booth with a stack of glossies and a magic marker, endless ways for now mature fans to turn their ordinary money into autumnal reverie.

Disney Imagery in Citizen Kane

Watching the marvelous Blu-ray edition of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), I was struck by how certain shots foreshadowed the imagery of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) released by the same studio, RKO, only four years later: the gothic castle at night with its one glowing window ...

... the outstretched hand dropping the apple (or, in Kane's case, a snow globe) to show the passage from life to death (or, in Snow White's case, a death-like state from which she will eventually be awakened).

The purpose of this gothic faerie tale imagery in the prologue of Citizen Kane is to establish Kane as a figure of myth and legend, like an ogre or an archetypal fairie tale king. What's most remarkable is not Welles' usage of this fairie tale imagery, but the sudden transition from the *mythic* imagery of the prologue to the hard documentary *reality* (almost cinema verite in some shots) of "News on the March." This abrupt and dissonant clash in styles was virtually unprecedented in film at the time Kane was made (Had Welles been reading Joyce's Ulysses?) and serves to warn the viewer that henceforth the character of Kane will be viewed simultaneously through two lenses, the lens of myth and the lens of reality. In fact, as the film progresses, we will see Kane through several other clashing points of view. Style in Kane equals content, the style of the film telling us that no man or event can be understood through only one way of seeing.

The Surreal World of Slavko Vorkapich

Like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Serbian–born Slavko Vorkapich (1894-1976) was not only a filmmaker, but a respected film theorist, and like those two Soviet giants, Vorkapich’s theories were mainly about editing – the right and wrong ways to cut two shots together, the “kinesthetic” (physical) effects that could be produced in the viewer through montage.

As a filmmaker, Vorkapich co-directed with Robert Florey the experimental short film The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra (1928, above), and he was the leading creator of montage sequences for studios like RKO and MGM during Hollywood’s “Classic Era.” He was Chairman of the USC Department of Cinema from 1949 through 1951, a mentor to future Gumby-animator, Art Clokey. He continued to lecture on film until his death in the mid-‘70s.

But beneath the respectable veneer of an Apollonian film theorist lurked the soul of a Dionysian surrealist.

Consider the evidence:

Crime Without Passion (Ben Hecht, 1934)

Vorkapich’s opening montage is by far the most striking part of Hecht’s adultery melodrama. Notwithstanding the various editing tricks employed (and there are some good ones), the most memorable aspect of Vorkapich’s montage is its crazed surrealist imagery, the screeching Harpy animas emerging from drops of blood to enflame the passions of The City.



Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Victor Fleming, 1941)

Who but Vorkapich could have conceived this montage that accompanies the chemically-induced transformation of kindly Dr. Jekyll into murderous Mr. Hyde? Spencer Tracy as Dr. Jekyll cracks a phallic whip over a chariot driven by two galloping horses, one dark, one light. The horses turn into his leading ladies, brunette Ingrid Bergman and blonde Lana Turner (previously seen as water lilies). MADNESS! MADNESS!!



The Mask (Julian Roffman, 1961)

Where, previously, Vorkapich’s montage sequences had been icing on someone else’s narrative cake, in The Mask (Canada's first horror film), Vorkapich’s anaglyphic 3-D hallucination sequences ARE the cake, the reason why people pay to see this film in the first place. The film’s narrative sequences are strictly set-up. A psychologist played by Paul Stevens acquires an ancient Aztec mask. He hears a commanding voice, “Put the mask on now!” (which also cues the audience to put their 3-D glasses on), he obeys the command, and then the real fun (Vorkapich’s hallucination sequences) begins. Removing the mask, the psychologist finds a dead body in the room, someone he must have murdered during his fugue state. Like a drug addict, he vows never to repeat the experience, but of course his vow is soon broken …

The thing to notice here is that Vorkapich has abandoned editing tricks almost entirely in favor of pure archetypal dream imagery. The psychologist’s dream-double gropes his way - like Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - through a world of cobwebs and mist and trees with organs that breathe. Stalactites hang like giant insect legs. A blonde mask-wearing anima beckons, but hooded figures with clawed, flame-shooting hands intervene and carry the helpless girl to an altar of sacrifice.



The Mask, including 3-D glasses, can be obtained through the usual on-line sources. Wondering how to celebrate Halloween? PUT THE MASK ON NOW!!

Let the wild rumpus start! Ghidorah Lives!

In the most recent edition of BLFJ (65), I wrote about the (inter)relationship that's developed between novels, films, and their screenplay binding agent. As such, I was rather interested to read about Dave Eggers' The Wild Things: a novelization of a movie adapted from a book.

Typical of such things, there's even an overlooked screenplay-shadow lurking behind this hodgepodge narrative mass ... somewhere, the filmscript always a literary and narrative Other.

Beyond reinforcing my thesis that the great narrative genre of the twenty-first century is three-headed, the Sendak-Jonze-Eggers Ghidorah further illustrates that we're living in a new aesthetic age fueled by the adaptation imperative, wherein almost every genre finds itself involved in an on-going, partner-swapping, swing-dance session that shows no signs of abating.

If anything, it's intensifying.

Thank God Linda Hutcheon gave us a roadmap!

Eggers discusses his novel and the experience of working with Spike Jonze on the 15 October edition of NPR's "All Things Considered."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JACK ARNOLD (October 14, 1916 – March 17, 1992)

Photo: Director Jack Arnold (right) shows star Grant Williams how to handle a giant prop used in the making of The Incredible Shrinking Man.

If director Jack Arnold were alive today, he would be 93. A former stage actor and also a writer who occasionally co-authored his screenplays, Arnold was an underrated master of genre (science fiction, horror, westerns, film noir) and of film form, the only filmmaker to have directed four features in the 3-D format. His best-remembered movies include It Came From Outer Space (1953), The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957 - his masterpiece), High School Confidential (1958), The Space Children (1958), and The Mouse That Roared (1959). To celebrate his birthday, and in the spirit of Catherine Grant’s great Film Studies for Free website, Bright Lights After Dark offers the following collection of links relating to director Arnold and his work.

Allan Gray – Thoughts on ‘No Name on the Bullet’

Arbogast - Unusual Histories (Tarantula)

C. Jerry Kutner – Welcome to the Modern World: Program Notes for a Michelangelo Antonioni-Jack Arnold Film Festival

C. Jerry Kutner – 3-D Noir: Thank You, Mickey Spillane!

David Cairns – “All the Same I Feel Sorry for the Creature” (Creature From the Black Lagoon)

David Cairns – ET Go Home (It Came From Outer Space)

David Cairns – Lost in Space (The Glass Web)

Ed Howard - Jack Arnold Double Feature: Tarantula/Monster on the Campus

Ed Howard – The Monolith Monsters

Gary Tooze – The Incredible Shrinking Man DVD Review

Gary Tooze – Tarantula! DVD Review

John Brosnan - Jack Arnold: A History of Horror

Mark McGee & Susan Frank – Interview: Classic Sci-Fi Film Director Jack Arnold

SPECIAL BONUS for readers lucky enough to possess their own anaglyphic (red/green) 3-D glasses - a clip from It Came From Outer Space (1953) that shows Arnold's feeling for the otherness of landscape and why I consider him the first American master of three-dimensional mise-en-scène. (Via David Cairns.)

The Marienbad Music Video

So many music videos and television commercials have ripped off the imagery of Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad since its 1961 release that it makes perfect sense for someone to have created a music video consisting entirely of shots from the original film. The Asian singing voice reminds us of the affinities between Resnais's work and the work of Chinese director, Wong Kar-Wai (2046).