Watchmen (Updated 05 MAR 09)

05 MAR 09: Ah. Alan Moore is a warlock. From the picture on this post he looks like the reincarnation of Rasputin. Either way he’s put a curse on the movie version of Watchmen..

04 MAR 09: Sounds like Debbie Schlussel considers the movie will be a permanent blot on the culture, to say the least. Don’t sell her short in the area of comics. She’s a collector.

I must say I came across some of the items Debbie mentions in the aggregated volume of Watchmen books I started yesterday. Although I do not quease easily and the comics are self-consciously and ostentatiously “edgy” I would not raise the works to the level of high literature, as some have. The episode I finished was not as depraved as Ms. Schlussel makes the movie out to be, but you could easily see where a team of worm-eaten minds in Hollywood would gleefully enhance the visuals and action to the point of depravity.

03 MAR 09: Al Moore, creator of Watchmen, is immune to the Hollywood disease. He is so immune that he gets his name taken off projects and gives the money to the artists. What a guy.

The film adaptation opens this week and we’ll crash to read the original, our copy of which was misplaced. Son Leo located it today under son Lance’s slab.

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The only epic comedy

From the toss of the “little kiddie bike” to the final touch of backing up the pick-up truck Jonathan Winters takes out his frustration on one of the necessities of the mad modern world, a gas station.

Amd here’s Phil Silvers in the movie’s best semi-cameo.

In a film with so many comedic moments, what happens in this scene is the moving image we’ve carried with us through life:

Tha Agony and the Ecstasy: One great man to another

Big Hollywood’s TCM Pick of the Day for Sunday is The Agony and the Ecstasy, just more Charlton Heston being great playing a great man. Heston had such a body of work that it’s difficult to cover it all.

But you do what you can. We have a Heston tribute page with clips of some of his later sci-fi work, movies that would have been far far less worthy without him. Would anyone remember The Omega Man for Anthony Zerbe’s scenery-chewing smorgasbord as the hippie-zombie leader alone? Would Zerbe, a craftsman in his own right, have taken on the project if Heston wasn’t on board?

Something happened in the film business soon after the mid-60’s, and we sense that it only had a little to do with cultural or political revolution, or color television. Why was it films like The Agony and the Ecstasy could no longer be made? Why was it that Hitchcock, after practically inventing a genre, and making classic upon classic, had to resort to Bruce Dern in Family Plot, which is a fun watch but no classic, and Frenzy, which is not nearly either? Was there no room in the market for a Hitchcock?

We’ll come up with the answer. Someday.

One last note about The Agony and the Ecstasy (Amazon link below.) The movie, as movies must be, is a well-executed abridgement of only the one section of the book involving the confrontations with the Pope and Michelanelo’a most famous non-sculpture. Irving Stone’s book is well worth the read for that and for other details, such as Michelangelo’s attachment to the land, his related approach to his favored medium, marble, and his spirituality.

The Fountainhead: The Money Quote – Dominique lays eyes on Howard

I’ll get back to reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainheadand had to put it down a while back. It flattens out some and gets a bit anti-climactic after Howard meets Dominique. This just happens also to be the most memorable scene in the film as well. But while Gary Cooper is better than good as Howard (he’s still Gary Cooper) Patricia Neal isDominique Francon. 

The episode is also one of the most intense and exquisitely written passages in the book. The liquid cool sado-masochist Dominique gets a brief glimpse of hell, and looking up at her is an unyielding man like none she has ever met:

Because the sun was too hot, that morning, and she knew it would be hotter at the granite quarry, because she wanted to see no one and knew she would face a gang of workers, Dominique walked to the quarry. The thought of seeing it on that blazing day was revolting; she enjoyed the prospect.

 

When she came out of the woods to the edge of the great stone bowl, she felt as if she were thrust into an execution chamber filled with scalding steam. The heat did not come. from the sun, but from that broken cut in the earth, from the reflectors of flat ridges. Her shoulders, her head, her back, exposed to the sky, seemed cool while she felt the hot breath of the stone rising up her legs to her chin, to her nostrils. The air shimmered below, sparks of fire shot through the granite; she thought the stone was stirring, melting, running in white trickles of lava. Drills and hammers cracked the still weight of the air. It was obscene to see men on the shelves of the furnace. They did not look like workers, they looked like a chain gang serving an unspeakable sentence for some unspeakable crime. She could not turn away.

 

She stood, as an insult to the place below. Her dress—the color of water, a pale green-blue, too simple and expensive., its pleats exact like edges of glass—her thin heels planted wide apart on the boulders, the smooth helmet of her hair, the exaggerated fragility of her body against the sky—flaunted the fastidious coolness of the gardens and drawing rooms from which she came.

 

She looked down. Her eyes stopped on the orange hair of man who raised his head and looked at her.

 

She stood very still, because her first perception was not of sight, but of touch: the consciousness, not of a visual presence, but of a slap in the face. She held one hand awkwardly away from her body, the fingers spread wide in the air, as against a wall. She knew that she could not move until he permitted her to.

 

She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth; the planes of his gaunt hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see, because it was the abstraction of strength made visible. She felt a convulsion of an­ger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure. He stood looking up at her; it was not a glance, but an act of ownership. She thought she must let her face give him the answer he deserved. But she was looking instead, at the stone dust on his burned arms, the wet shirt clinging to his ribs, the lines of his long legs. She was thinking of those statues of men she had always sought; she was wondering what he would look like naked. She saw him looking at her as if he knew that. She thought she had found an aim in life—a sudden, sweeping hatred for that man.

 

So if we ever find ourselves in consultation with a cosmetic surgeon and they ask what kind of face we want, we’ll ask for that “abstraction of strength made visible” one. Yah. 

A Cat in the Temple of Bast

I come to bury 2008, not to praise it…

Although, we must say, friends, web surfers and Infinity-ites, that the famous and famously ironic funeral speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar may not quite fit, we are reminded of it for the reason outlined below.

Having recently acquired two kittens, Achilles and Odysseus – names that will probably continue to translate around here to “the black one” and “the gray one,” respectively - we got a cat movie from Netflix, a movie both Mrs. Shears and I remember seeing in our long-lost youths, The Three Lives of Thomasina. 

The image that stuck with me all these years was the near-death experience where the cat heroine dreams of falling into the afterlife in the Egyptian Temple of Bast…

Thomasina enters the Temple of Bast

Cooincidentally we called Mother Shears for New Years and asked if she remembered where we first saw the movie as a child. Of course she immediately remembered making the birthday trip to New York and seeing it at Radio City. I also have a vivid memory from that trip of the famous Camel smoke ring billboard out a restaurant window.  The trip would have been January 1965 and the billboard would be gone sometime the next year.

Anyway, this memorable scene in the film rang familiar…when the boy conducting the funeral paraphrases Shakespeare’s speech from Marc Antony. “We have come to bury Thomasina, and to praise her…”

Here’s the whole scene from youtube, including both the near-death dream and, Mrs. Shears’ favorite scene, the funeral and its beautiful setting (overlooking Loch Fyne in Inverary, Scotland):

Mrs. Shears has her own fashion-oriented post about Thomasina over at allchic.com.

The Three Lives of Thomasina, though promoted as a movie for and about little girls (human and feline) – is, if you stick with it longer than the 15 minutes, which son Leo apparently could not manage -  well worth a more mature look. Patrick McGoohan gives a strong performance as the single father, a reluctant veterinarian - he wanted to be a doctor – who is forced to make primal choices dealing with grief at his own loss and the seemingly willful loss he imposes on his headstrong daughter.

The film’s outer story of a little girl’s love for a cat rides thinly over a much more interesting theme that mixes multiple religion types and points them at the question of what constitutes helping, what is the moral basis for Earthly charity…and who exactly is being helped. The old-religion is represented by a Celtic “witch” – and note that the kids mark the grave with a cairn not a cross; there’s the formalized pagan Egyptian imagery in the near-death dream;  and the modern, establishment Christianity, personified by the stolid and wise town vicar, who stands at one point before his Earthly edifice with a “Church of Scotland’ sign rooted prominently behind him.

All of these theologies get equal and even-handed treatment up to a point. The witch has an empathy with the animals, the image of Thomasina rising to merge with the golden idol of Bast is hard to shake for the rest of the film after the dream sequence, and the vicar dispenses his brand of standardized wisdom and heartfelt kindness freely. But in a surprising reversal we get Lori the witch woven in with a plot turn that brings on the expected Disney ending. What we learn about what Lori actually believes is quite obviously intentionally emphasized by the makers. See it for yourself and you’ll know what we mean.

Mario Puzo: The Godfather backstory

Here’s a timely behind-the-scenes skin-of-his-teeth saga writing of one of the biggest book/movie combos of all time. Timely around here because son Chuck, 15,  just finished reading The Godfather. I had read it at around the same age, snuck it out of the elder Bill Shear’s sock drawer. Times have changed.

RIP Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton, truly a King-of-All-Media Media Renaissance Man, is gone. We didn’t even know he was sick.

Personally, we remember reading The Andromeda Strain at the shore one summer, and then the following year, in my first real job, as an usher, we got to see the movie version about 30 times. Enjoyed it every time.

Later came Jurassic Park and ER, but if you read his memoir, Travels, you’d know that he was at one time convinced that he was locked in psychic combat with, in his words, The Entity. His strange real-life psychological struggle was never made into a work of fiction. Truth is stranger than fiction, after all, especially that kind of personal truth.

Here’s his sensible synthesis of the interconnection between belief in aliens and the promotion of Global Warming. Only Crichton could have written it, lectured it , or gotten it published. Even so, for essays like this, and for making a best-seller like with State of Fear, which dissents from popular scientific myth-making, Crichton is, and will be, ridiculed as much as a mega-successful author/filmmaker could be, by far far lesser talents.

Mongol

Saw Mongol last night, and it’s another one of those movies that illustrates the at-times wide gap between interesting and merely entertaining. It was good to see once, but you wouldn’t want to sit through it for repeat viewings. Master and Commander, and Gladiator are two such movies that do qualify for repeated viewings (and it’s not because the both have Russell Crowe.) The former is without a single line spoken by a woman, while the latter has two women intensely involved in the hero’s motivations. So it’s not a matter of sex.

[SPOILERS ahead.]

Besides the huge narrative gaps in Mongol, it appears that even movies made in Russia now must be “Hollywood” movies. Apparently Genghis Khan conquered a third of the Earth’s surface because of a woman. His rise? It was all her idea.

And then there were those wide-as-the-steppes-themselves narrative gaps. One minute Temujin is wandering around the landscape (as he does a number of times after escaping stocks and cages, etc., once with divine assistance) and the next second he has a horde! Just like that.

Uniting the tribes is given a brief mention and his establishing of laws scanty lip service. Much more interesting would be how the uniting of the tribes came about in some more detail. Yes, a major rivalry is addressed ironically and climactically but a few of the earlier rivalries with leaders who did Temujin dirt were left unresolved. Nor was there any clear indication of what happened to his mother. If the researchers don’t know, that’s one thing, and they don’t have to speculate ahistorically. But some clear acknowledgment that perhaps being orphaned was a factor. This was not achieved if intended, since his inner strength could be traced to before he lost either parent. As it is Temujin comes off as a fairly one-dimensional character in a single-minded, and almost whipped, quest for Borte.  

And for all it’s slow-mo violence, the filmmakers chickened out on depicting the cruelty and barbarism of life on the steppe. No one gets nailed to the wooden horse to take a week to die. But the secret to Temujin’s success? Being kind to the families of dead warriors and orders not to kill women and children. Call it the feminization of the Great Kahn.

And for the big epic battle Temujin’s winning “tactics” amount to a squadron of double-sword wielding horsemen, straight from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a line of pop-up archers and again, divine intervention. The historical Ghengis’s accompishments along these lines are sold woefully short.

While the Mongol khannish wedding traditions were interesting, launch the story, and provide a nice little bookend, letting the viewer leave the theater giving all credit to Borte, who was having children by everyone but Temujin, was almost as bogus as having that teeny-booper helping Beethoven conduct the debut of the 9th Symphony from behind the oboes in Copying Beethoven. Almost.

For those historical film buffs and Mongol enthusiasts out there you’ll want to see this one. Hopefully they’ll do the sequel with a little more credit where credit’s due.

The worst part is that now that a big costly epic has been made of G. Khan’s early life, like Peter Jackson’s inept King Kong,  there won’t be another attempt in quite a while.