24/7 (The Sandman, Jamie Childs) Television

Diner time

So now we have it: a fairly big-budgeted adaptation of Neil Gaiman's celebrated fantasy series. Beautifully cast, ingeniously reworked, adequately directed.

Dr. Who Season 6: The Doctor's Wife (Richard Clark, 2011)

The Doctor's eponymous spouse (not dressed thusly in the episode, sad to say)

The Doctor's great love

"What's in that book?" 
"Spoilers!" 
"Who are you?" 
"Professor River Song, University of--"  
"To me. Who are you to me?"  
"Again: spoilers!"

Was looking at Steven Moffat's Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead again, from the fourth season of Doctor Who.

Was not a big fan of this, first time I saw it. Too busy, I thought; too much recycling of past Moffat devices (the zombielike masked figure repeating his eerie phrase over and over again in The Empty Child, for one). Plus, following Blink-- easily one of the most intricately written and frightening Dr. Who episodes ever written--anything less than a home-run masterpiece was bound to feel disappointing. 

But the episodes grow on you, especially on repeat viewing, especially after what we know now about Dr. River Song--after her little soliloquy involving 'the worst day in the world' for her, as outlined in Season 6's Day of the Moon.

It's all here, in our first meeting with Dr. Song. She meets him, she talks to him; when she realizes that he doesn't know her, she's devastated. Actress Alex Kingston doesn't overplay this--it's there if you happen to know what you're looking for--but the absolute agony on her face, knowing she's meeting the Doctor (David Tennant) for the very last time and he doesn't know it, is harrowing to watch. Possibly Moffat has invented a new sub-genre in drama--the character whose subtext deepens and develops with repeat viewing (perhaps not, but--he did make me pause).

While we're at it, kudos as well for The Beast Below, from the fifth season. After the exuberance of The Eleventh Hour, this episode came off when I first viewed it as another sharp disappointment (I remember feeling that maybe Moffat shouldn't have taken the role of showrunner after all, that he's finally assumed a position that's simply too much for him).

On re-viewing however--yes, there are flaws; yes there's too much invention (flying cities, interstellar whales, mass migrations, police states, long-lived royalty, elections with accompanying memory wipes) crammed into a little over forty minutes; yes the poor Smilers are given short shrift--from being potentially as frightening as the Weeping Angels they're relegated to being low-ranking enforcers of British law, quickly dropped and forgotten. Yes the ending may be a tad too life-affirming, the so-called police state ultimately too benign for good drama.

But the episode's not about scaring your pants off (though for a moment there it may have been touch and go); it's more about Amy (Karen Gillan) learning a crucial bit of information regarding her traveling companion, the 'mad man with a box' (Matt Smith, taking over from Tennant). It's about acquiring empathy for all kinds of creatures, great and small, especially long-lived ones unable to articulate their loneliness. It's also about two strangers thrown together who in  crisis learn how to work with each, trust each other. As an episode about character, about one more piece to the puzzle that is the Doctor's personality--in my book a crucial piece, that gives us a hint as to what drives him onwards--I think it's an excellent and poignant example of the genre.

Moffat despite his inconsistent record is possibly one of the better writers on Who--but just this past few weeks we've seen evidence of a writer as good if not better: comics writer Neil Gaiman, who penned The Doctor's Wife. 

Yes, I've heard complaints about Gaiman. His narratives tend to meander, he studiously avoids conflicts with heroes and villains, he as studiously avoids resolving said conflicts, anointing a winner and a loser by story's end. 

Personally I like unconventional storytelling, where conflict isn't apparent and heroes and villains almost indistinguishable--but I can see where an exclusive diet of this can seem wearying, and Gaiman's fiction at its most careless can devolve into a series of static tableaus and stillborn images (conflict, after all, being the motor that drives narrative).

There's definitely a motor in The Doctor's Wife--a malevolently intelligent planetoid out to consume the Doctor's TARDIS--but as with all things Gaiman you know (you just do, that's all) where his priorities lie: in the delineation of character, the working-out of a character's personality and psyche, and how this interacts with other characters. 

Gaiman is a longtime fan of the show, you see it in the way he sets most of the action in a junkyard, arguably alluding to the opening scene of the very first episode ("An Unearthly Child"), or evoking details from various Who episodes ("Edge of Destruction," "Castrovalva," "Logopolis," "The Five Doctors"), but perhaps his one stroke of genius is to take this imposing mountain of continuity and lore and with the snap of his fingers send them spinning into orbit around a single central idea: that the Doctor's TARDIS has suddenly been incarnated as a beautiful if eccentrically dressed and coiffed woman (Suranne Jones). 

Beyond Rose, beyond River Song, beyond Romana and all the women and men and aliens and such the Doctor has known and rescued and cared for throughout the star systems and centuries, this is the central relationship of the show. If anything, the basic Who formula boils down to: 1) Doctor arrives at a strange time or planet in his TARDIS; 2) Doctor is separated from his TARDIS; 3) Doctor must resolve issue before reuniting with his TARDIS or die. Or worse. 

Dramatically speaking, the need to separate the two is obvious--not much suspense possible if you can simply pop back and make things right. But corollary to this we often see the Doctor running after his beloved police box in episode after episode, their eventual reunion almost always an occasion for celebration. It's inevitable--if he doesn't get to her by episode's end, there won't be another episode (either that or it's a cliffhanger).

Gaiman's recasts this narratively and dramatically necessary relationship in fleshy terms--not between man and machine, but between man and woman. Given a mouth, the TARDIS takes a nip at the Doctor's ear: "Biting is excellent! It's like kissing, only there's a winner." Given a mouth, she spouts other equally outrageous statements--among others, the idea that she stole the Doctor, not the other way around ("What makes you think I would ever give you back?" she asks); also the idea that she takes the Doctor not where he wants to go, but "where you need to go."

Oh yeah. The seemingly opposing qualities of random eccentricity and dramatic necessity in the long-running television series are squared away into narrative coherence with that single statement. I've seen fantasy writers work with as much imagination; not sure I've ever seen one work with as much audacious elegance.

Readers familiar with Gaiman's work may spot reworked material. Idris (the enfleshed TARDIS' nickname) with her eccentric line deliveries, her obsession with the precise definition of a word, her ability to conceive of time not as a series of moments the way we mere mortals do but all at once--all that seems to have been inspired by the figure of Delight, one of the Endless in the Sandman comic books. The Doctor himself at certain moments assumes a distinctly Morpheus-like pose (When he hangs sadly from a sling, say, fiddling with the TARDIS' innards).

I love it that the episode's publicity makes such a big deal about showing us hitherto unknown parts of the TARDIS--which turn out to be yet more corridors (the series is notorious for the number of passages its protagonists have sprinted through). I love it that with a series of hallways and a pair of fleet-footed humans, Gaiman still manages to inject a note of unmitigated horror. I love it that all that footwork leads them to the Ninth Doctor's control room--quietly kept stored away ("for neatness," Idris explains).

I especially love the moment when the Doctor introduces Idris to Amy, and explains what she is. "Did you wish really hard?" Amy asks sarcastically. Heck, I wasn't even really looking for anything specific--just a sort of generalized hope for a good season, with maybe a handful of outstanding episodes--but here it is.

6.4.11

Roger Ebert kills Brillante Mendoza's 'Kinatay' (which wins Best Director in Cannes anyway); Coraline; Rear Window; Le Plaisir

Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay

If they move, kill em

Roger Ebert, the gray eminence of Chicago film criticism, has weighed in on Kinatay (The Execution of P, 2009), Brillante Mendoza's latest work, presently in the Competition section of Cannes, and his verdict is not kind: Here is a film that forces me to apologize to Vincent Gallo for calling "The Brown Bunny" the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.

Stardust (Matthew Vaughn, 2007)

Twinkle, twinkle

The trailers of Stardust (2007) didn't look promising--"secondhand Narnia," I thought; "maybe third-hand Lord of the Rings," and forgot about it. When I heard enthusiastic praise from enough people though, my curiosity was aroused, so I went for a look.

I wasn't wrong in thinking it looked like a third-hand Lord of the Rings ripoff--Matthew Vaughn (he directed the gangster flick Layer Cake, which looked and felt like secondhand Guy Richie (and in fact Vaughn, a friend, produced two of Richie's pictures)) has included one too many horse chases edited to look spatially disjointed (see the similar chase between Frodo and the Ringwraiths in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring), not to mention a heroine that makes the viewer want to bend his head low and cough "Gah-ladriel! Gah-ladriel!" And the sky pirates--did the filmmakers see Hayao Miyazaki's Tenku no shiro Rapyuta (Castle in the Sky, 1986) with its airbag ship filled with ostensibly vicious pirates that at one point sails through a lightning storm? One wonders.

It doesn't help that much of the CGI effects look cheap, that the light-and-sound show that accompanies the climactic duel seem (as do most magical confrontations nowadays (I'd throw in the latest Harry Potter movie, while I'm at it)) especially underfunded, and that the cast seems composed of actors that have been picked out of a hat.

All that said--it's not bad; not bad at all. I'm not being sarcastic; the picture just about won me over when it introduced the seven fratricidal princes (Jason Flemyng and Rupert Everett, among others) and their senile father-king (Peter O'Toole); "now that," I told myself as one brother pushed the other off a high balcony, "I haven't seen in a fantasy pic yet; or at least not recently (I'm thinking of Jean Cocteau's 1946 La belle et la bete (Beauty and the beast), with its trio of shrewish sisters and a buffoonish suitor)." The brothers take on the appearance they had at the moment of their deaths (one looks darkly toasted; another has an axe sticking out the side of his head; another has distinctly flattened features (he's the high diver); another--but you get the idea), and if they're not lucky--if, say, an heir to the throne is not chosen from one of their bloodline before they're all eliminated--then I suppose they'll be stuck in this world as wraiths, looking the way they do for all eternity.

Stardust as it turns out, was adapted from the novel-length fantasy written by one Neil Gaiman; the moment I heard his name, the dawn broke--I was wondering who could be so openly, cheerfully macabre, so eccentrically humorous this side of Roald Dahl. If you've read any of Gaiman's graphic novels--he's best known for his stint writing Sandman--you'd in all likelihood recognize his voice in this picture, that combination of deadpan whimsy, mordant sadism and the odd, steady whisper of dark melancholy.

Gaiman is a welcome, fairly new voice in fantasy (fantasy cinema, at least). We've heard from him a few times before--bits of wayward humor found in his translation of Miyazaki's Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke, 1997--yet another chain linking Gaiman to the animator's works), the screenplay to a rather beautiful (in my opinion) oddity called MirrorMask (2005). This may be the first time we've seen him working on a relatively conventional narrative (by "relatively conventional" I mean--well, you have to see MirrorMask); all the familiar elements from the classic tales are present: the youth longing for adventure; the brothers sent out on a quest one at a time (each in his own unique way failing); the inn whose occupants are in magical disguise; the princess under a curse; so forth and so on. Stardust isn't as radical and disorienting a feature as MirrorMask--one reason I suspect that film failed to find a large audience was that its very strangeness is rather off-putting--so the former has done better business (relatively speaking; it's not doing Harry Potter-sized business).

MirrorMask is possibly the purest dose of Gaiman I've yet experienced on the big screen; in it you feel Gaiman's love for the grotesquely poetic, for (among many other sources) both L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz and Charles Dodgson's Alice books; you also feel the disdain for easy emotional payoffs. The protagonist's ostensible quest--to find the eponymous mask and save a queen in enchanted sleep--is the merest slip of an excuse to present a monstrous, Borgesian menagerie of dream creatures, one more bizarre than the next, with (as dream creatures are wont to do) not-so-immediately-discernible analogues in real life. In Stardust Gaiman takes the opposite approach; he throws up a storm of fantasy elements--Babylon candles, fallen stars, magic threads, walls between worlds, seven mistrustful brothers, three evil witches--that act as garish distractions, that eventually fall away as if in a striptease, leaving behind the love story at the heart of the film.

It's hard to pin down the nature of Gaiman's appeal, actually; like a half-remembered scent--half-remembered not because it wasn't memorable but because your mind was never allowed to focus on it exclusively--you struggle to recall the effect, a combination of modern-day cynicism and anachronistic romanticism and brief bouts of bizarre violence, whipped vigorously together to give a temporary semblance of coherence. The mix isn't for everyone--Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum, for one, disliked what he described as the movie's "cruelty," and there are even knowledgeable connoisseurs of fantasy who can't stand Gaiman's work--but for others it's like stumbling onto your favorite fix lying across the road--for all you know (or care), freshly dropped out of the sky.

So--how, finally, to put it? I enjoyed this far more than the most recent Potter movie--well, more than every Potter movie ever made save Cuaron's (always better when a real filmmaker is directing); I enjoyed this more than Jackson's hugely overrated Lord of the Ring trilogy (unlike the "Ring" pictures it's got sex appeal and (more important to me) sexy repartee, it's free of even a whisper of pretension, and it doesn't take more than a third of a day to watch); I enjoyed it more than Narnia (the one movie in this little group based (in my opinion) on truly great material (if only it had a filmmaker to match)). Like I said--not bad; not bad at all.

(First published in Businessworld, 10/12/07)

Stardust (Matthew Vaughn, 2007), Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2007)

Stardust is not (to get that out of the way) great fantasy filmmaking. Too much CGI for my taste, some of the action scenes seem clearly modeled after the Peter Jackson house style (lots of circling shots and mismatched landscapes), and the music could be more original. I hear Gilliam was first offered this, and I wish he did take it; for first half hour I kept thinking he could do wonders with the material. But then 1) Gilliam's done this before, and 2) I can see where it doesn't present too many sides to capture his interest.

Then I learn it's Neil Gaiman, which explains a lot. The script has a macabre humor all its own (seven fratricidal brothers; three witches out to cut out and eat a girl's heart; a sky pirate with a deep, dark secret), and the kind of inventive, tightly paced plotting that betrays Gaiman's comic-book background (writing for comics isn't completely without its virtues--Alfred Bester learned how to tell a story this way, for one). The cast certainly agrees, because they throw body and soul into the project (at the very least it's obvious they're having a great time). Easily outdoes the past two Harry Potter movies in the enchantment (the emotional kind) department.

Herzog's Rescue Dawn--did someone say The Bourne Ultimatum was the best action film of the year, of several years? Beg to differ; there's this film, and Michael Mann's Miami Vice, just off the top of my head.

This is more of an escape picture than an action film, I suppose, but the pleasure here is in Herzog being granted the giant toy train set that's a Hollywood production, and seeing how far he runs with it. I think he can play with the best of them--unlike, say, Greengrass, he knows when to do a shaky-cam (immersive shots where the camera takes on the character's point of view, emphasizing his helplessness) and when to go for smooth crane shots (objective POV, where the point is to create suspense, or a sense of approaching menace). The plane crash--the single most spectacular sequence in the film--glides by with a touch of unrealism: the plane comes down, flames and smoke, breaks apart, and hatches Dieter into the rice fields, like some kind of mosquito larva, all in what almost seems like a single smooth motion. I can imagine Herzog playing with our notion of emergency landings, turning it into some kind of unstated joke, a quick wink at what Hollywood plane crashes are supposed to look like (at the same time outdoing the standard-issue crash with careless grace and skill).

Then there are the touches uniquely his--the great, slow, downward pans from the tips of mountains to their base, filling the whole screen, showing us the immensity of nature; the little cameos of insects, from a beetle whirling on string to a huge butterfly on someone's limb, wings flapping lazily to a caterpillar on a leaf, doing its level best to clamber onto Steve Zahn's face.

There's the sense of heat, humidity, of sheer mass of foliage pressing all around; sometimes the jungle seems like a thousand-fingered hand, reluctant to release Deiter (Christian Bale) and Duane (Zahn), the two Vietcong prisoners making their bid for freedom.

And I love some of the lines, which are pure Herzog. "This is not a village;" "no, it is a village." "I dreamed there was a fire." Herzog's heroes struggle under extreme conditions, and as a result of all that suffering they've lost their grasp of reality, must assert or debate it out loud; Zahn is so unsure of what happened he has to tentatively suggest he only dreamed there was a fire, there, of course, was--yet another of Herzog's sly pranks on his characters.

The American flag-waving seems a tad much, but for some reason I can actually see Herzog buying into that; it's just something I sense in him, a need to want approval from a country whose commercial cinema has had little use for his own work, save for the occasional plagiarism (see Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now with reference to Aguirre the Wrath of God). He seems to want to take the relationship to a whole other level. 

That said, he does give one a sense that the Laotians aren't stereotypical Asian tormentors or merely sadistic prison guards (check out Cimino's odious The Deer Hunter, or even interestingly enough John Woo's Bullet in the Head). They're people with a sense of real anger (not unjustified) at the United State's unadmitted bombings of their country.

And I love the little details--the question of toilets and defecation in a jungle prison (always an important question, but one you never hear from Rambo), of food and water, and laundry (I love it that they're shown actually doing their laundry). I love the dynamic between prisoners, how emotions of trust and affection and anger flow freely between them, intense and open like irrigation canals. I love how physically expressive Herzog makes Bale and Zahn, always touching each other, putting head on shoulder, cuddling against each other for warmth. That's how people who've spent time--months and years--in prison behave, even stay sane.

It's not Herzog's best, and I can see where the argument that he's sold out might stick, but if he is selling out, I wish he'd done so decades ago; it's head and shoulders better than anything from Hollywood nowadays.

8.28.07