The Second Jungle Book

“THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK”

By Rudyard Kipling, 1902

Much of the superficial reputation of Kipling’s “The Jungle Books” is surely down to the Disney adaptation, but Disney could not be further from the source material. The books carry the taste of genuine fables, the kind that came from the fireside tradition and bedtime stories. Firstly, they are not all based around Mowgli; secondly, Mowgli himself is not the cutesy Disney imp one might expect to meet; he is proud and defiant, a killer of enemies and as philosophical as any other of the jungle animals. And these books, like so many true classics ostensibly considered children’s books, are not childish. Kipling’s “Just So Stories” may feel to be and are directed at the young reader/listener, but “The Jungle Books” are denser, less whimsical and more fascinating and complete.

Kipling does not routinely rely upon action to guide his story, but rather rumination on nature, man and violence as spoken through the man-cub and the jungle animals. Many of the stories that comprise the Jungle Books are conversation pieces: animals and characters sitting around negotiating, discussing, telling stories. “The Undertakers”, for example, is founded on a conversation between a pelican, a crocodile and a wolf, talking about eating and hunting: what emerges is a stark and unsentimental contemplation on the food chain. Although “Letting in the Jungle” seems as if it will build up to a chase narrative - wherein Mowgli will help the white couple that adopted him in earlier stories to escape from a town that believes Mowgli to be a werewolf of sorts, and therefore making the couple witches by association - Kipling rather allows conversations to mark the story and all the action to be told seemingly in that retrospective manner of the storyteller. Kipling is a natural storyteller whose prose and dialogue all serve vividly to depict events and conflict and contemplation.

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Accusations of colonialist mentality and racism have long dogged Kipling’s reputation, and perhaps mostly due to “The White Man’s Burden”. However, The Jungle Books and Kim all exhibit a far more interesting and nuanced depiction of race relations: the eponymous hero of his novel “Kim” is a white boy, but Kim is culturally and psychologically an Indian native. Likewise, Mowgli is of man, and yet is fluent in jungle (animal) talk and finds no place with society other than the jungle animals. Both boys are hybrids of culture and identity and both straddle the divide with great confidence and pride. Kipling was himself much like Kim in that he grew up in India before being brought to England for an education, and the friction and fascination of holding a dual identity is strong throughout these texts. It even extends to the tale of “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” wherein Purun Bhagat flows across the caste system from being prime minister to pauper to holy man across his lifetime.

Also notable is the portrayal of the animal kingdom as one big jungle democracy: “How Fear Came” has the animals congregate to discuss the upholding of their laws and hierarchy, for the sake of all-round harmony; and “The Law of the Jungle” details some of these in verse form. The latter also details the differences between each class and nature animals. The impression is of an analogy for international entities such as The United Nations, of diplomatic negotiations and respect for various and differing cultures and identities committing to the good of all. Many of Kipling’s protagonists are multicultural and swap castes and class comfortably. This is surely where Kipling’s true sentiment and vision lay, for his text repeatedly and lovingly investigate such transient identities. It is perhaps then inevitable that Kipling himself such a contrary character: as Peter Levi says in his introduction to “Just So Stories”: “I like his criticism of England, which was ceaseless, though I have also been told that he wrote the radio speeches of King George V.”*

His tales attack the artifice of the class system and respecting the many ways people live, and how identity is fluid depending upon environment. “Stalky and Co.” satirising and criticises the artifice of English boarding school educations, its chief success being the story “The ---” which condemns the educating of young men into soldiers. In The Jungle Books, it is true that man is the greatest threat to the jungle kingdom, but Kipling also vilifies unnecessary aggression (the animals the break the jungle laws) and deceit; for example, it is the fact that in “The King Ankus” the White Cobra lies to lure Mowgli into his den, and it is a jewel-studded sacrificial knife that represents all the murderous greed of mankind. The following two stories in “The Second Jungle Book”, however, do feature action sequences that put the reader into the thick of it.

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Kipling’s fascination with cultures is absorbing. “Quiquern” details the lifestyle of an Inuit boy and his dogs in a thorough, straightforward style, and with respect to the merciless nature of the elements that feels similar to Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild” and “White Fang”: in this story, the dogs do not talk. London alternates from such realism-based tales to the fables of Mowgli and his anthropomorphic jungle folk with ease. They may differ and vary, but their interest in society and different races/classes/species and the outsider characters that move through them unites the two parallel veins of storytelling. It is also this interest that keeps the talking animal strain of tales from the more fantastical flourishes of the fairy-tale: they remain fables. Indeed, the image of the eight-legged and two headed monster wolf has a nice explanation.

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With “Red Dog”, Mowgli’s story starts to winding down and the wolf pack that brought him up is coming to an end. They go out in a blaze of glory, seeing off a brutal pack of invading dholes. Mowgli’s Jungle, it seems, is not to be overrun and plundered by violent intruders who think it is theirs for the taking. The wisdom of the elders and the defiance of the young are more than a match for the great dhole rampage. It is a subtle enough anti-colonialism allegory. The final Jungle Book story, ---, is a melancholy affair with Mowgli all of seventeen years of age and although at the peak of his powers, no longer at the peak of his legendary status throughout the Jungle people. Dissatisfaction runs through him and he feels the pull of man and their civilisation. Man will always go to man, the animals have told him, and this troubles him but the problem of dual identities prove ongoing. What kind of existence and character could Mowgli achieve amongst mankind, where he will be as freakish and problematic as, say, Tarzan The Ape Man or Victor “The Wild Child”? But we are only left to imagine that, for Mowgli and his animal peers have already served their purpose in providing wonderful tales and criticism of civilisation.

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* Peter Levi, February 1986, introduction to: Rudyard Kipling, “Just So Stories”, Penguin Classics, 2000, pg. 8

Jose Mojica Marins will take your soul (part one)

JOSE MOJICA MARINS WILL TAKE YOUR SOUL:

part one: The Coffin Joe Trilogy

“At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul” (1964)

“This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse” (1967)

“Embodiment of Evil” (2008).

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“At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul” (1964) and “This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse” (1967) give us Ze do Caixao, or Coffin Joe: Brazilian horror superstar, played by the director himself, Jose Mojica Marins. The unusual point about this irresistibly titled horror double bill is that these are not the threats of our remarkable antihero and all-round bad guy, but that they are threats made to him. And what does Coffin Joe do to deserve these wonderfully ornate curses? Well, what won’t he do? And what debauchery he doesn’t do is not for want of trying, but more down to a low film budget. .

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The plots of these two films are more-or-less identical. Ze is a cape-and-top-hat wearing gravedigger with apparent wealth, long fingernails (all the better for eye-gouging) and an irrepressible affliction for metaphysical and nihilistic posturing and oration. Alone or with an audience, he cares not. “Soul” starts with Joe glaring and pointing into the camera: “What is life?” Such soliloquies, often very much asides to the audience as if we are being taken into Joe’s confidence, are fundamental to Marins’ films, as much as the phantasmagorical silence sequences. However, I am cautious about quoting too much for I am not about to put much faith in the subtitle translations, but we get the gist. (For this reason, I shall refrain from close-reading of Ze’s orations.) Joe goes for the big questions of life, death, mankind’s disgusting nature and insignificance, his own superiority, and so on. How much of this is in earnest on Marins’ part, how much of an actual philosophical enquiry or how much the character of Coffin Joe’s madman’s ravings is perhaps not totally clear. But he is not quite the only one given to preaching: “Soul” opens with Joe doing so, and then we are given a bold credits sequence made up of the juiciest bits to come later in the film (!), after which we are introduced to a hammy witch who clutches a skull also addresses the audience directly to dare them to deny the existence of the supernatural and horror. At the very least, these monologues make for highly entertaining and absurd padding.
Joe likes to go into town to provoke and terrorise the locals by mocking their beliefs in the supernatural and religion (same thing). He goes about like some untouchable feudal lord. Ze spits viciousness at the locals and then monologues about his superiority, about life and death and other such cosmic considerations that may or may not defy that innate superiority. When challenged he lets loose with Mr Hyde-like bloodshot eyes and tantrums with a near superhuman fury and violence, always besting his challengers through sheer brutality. He murders those that upset him. But in these confrontations, he is always just the right side of superhuman; he is more extraordinarily savage and sadistic than demonically possessed. In fact he mocks the concepts of possession, ghosts, witches, God, and even the Devil, with whom you would expect him to be on pretty fraternal terms. Ze’s nihilism and belief in nothing but himself is all-consuming. This is the tale of Coffin Joe’s megalomania, his love-hate war against anything unearthly, his love-affair with cruelty and misogyny, plus his quest to become immortalised by having a son and passing on his superior genes. One of the perversions of Ze is that he genuinely values children, although this too fits with his egomaniacal vision of the universe around him. He chooses and pursues a woman who may or may not be worthy to bear his child, but in murdering someone unworthy, he is cursed by his victims - in the very words of the title!! - and ultimately has a supernatural experience that puts him in his place and is vanquished. It is all very Gothic and melodramatic and delicious in its search for perversion, which it frequently pulls off not by explicitness - although it has its moments - but by tone and intimation. And it is all highly engrossing with Jose Mojica Marins’ thickly layered acting, some successful minor surrealism and inevitable unintentional humour. This is very much Marins’ show as he directs, produces and writes himself into a frenzy, oblivious to budgetary or acting restrictions. Committing himself with a gusto that motors the whole enterprise, Marins chews scenery, sneers and quivers his lips in demonic disgust, raises an arched eyebrow for sadism, unafraid to give himself a long unbroken take in which he throws himself around the somewhat shaky set design and battles the forces of the universe against him. In fact, his face is probably a little too soft to truly carry off the EVIL, but this too makes him more fascinating and works to good use particularly in “Corpse” when Ze comes to accidentally murder an unborn child and is overcome with guilt … it is almost like acting. Coffin Joe demands to be a compelling antihero and theatrical villain in the manner of old barnstormers. You get the idea that he would happily take on all of Brazil, should it doubt his pre-eminence, and that like Ze himself, Marins is oblivious to nay-sayers.

It is like a Hammer Horror by Herschell Gordon Lewis, by way of the scratchy realism of “Night of the Living Dead”. But Marins is a real film-maker, and not a bluffer like Lewis. Considering it pre-dates “Living Dead”, the eye-gouging and axing and litany of torture Marins serves up may seem relatively tame by contemporary standards, but it feels quite verbose for the period and still carries a genuine frission of perversity and shock, a frission embedded in the very ambience of the film. In this sense, in a more overt interest in cruelty and gore and given the era, Marin feels ahead of his time. Coffin Joe himself feels like a Victorian villain gone amok, so it is somewhat a surprise to see buses and other such modern details creep in around the edges. Ze’s assault on the town, women and good taste still disturbs and shocks with its venom. There is also a Jacques Tournier-like claustrophobia to “Soul” … or should I say the use and aesthetic of the often D.I.Y. sets falls somewhere between Tournier and Ed Wood; or perhaps a downmarket James Whale. Zest and inventiveness and decent composition of shots compensate for any wobbly sets and limited special effects… it is hard to disparage effects that simply put glitter upon the film stock to achieve a ghostly aura.
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These films are full of ambition and genuine vision: Marin’s films nearly always open with striking credits montages that immediately set the atmosphere of depravity and chaos. As with the best of all low-budget successes, Marin barely seems conscious of restrictions and often experiments and goes for broke to achieve the effect he wants. The opening credits play with editing and text in a manner that forecasts the standard varied styles of late twentieth century credit sequences; even the closing maggoty corpse in a mausoleum finale of “Soul” feel like a precursor to some Fulci excesses (and Joe’s cadaver looks pretty horrible and explicitly mutilated too). He is always looking to experiment formally: there is the sudden shock in “This Night I Will Posses Your Corpse” where Coffin Joe descends into hell (for the first time) and the film lurches into sudden vibrant colour. Hell is psychedelic and full of neon colours and again it is remarkable how much hellishness Marins can conjure up with so very little: parts of bodies sticking out of walls, various other tortures and nudity going on whilst the underworld glows red, pink, blue, green, etc. Marins is never lazy.

In the manner of most sequels, “This Night I Will Posses Your Corpse” goes for bigger and adding more: Where “Soul” was almost entirely conceived, built and filmed in a small area of a hall, “Corpse” certainly opens up and reaches a broader canvass, having more confrontations set around town squares and other exteriors and not only within claustrophobic rooms and graveyards. In “Corpse”, the town and secondary characters are more of a notable sideshow: a (rather unconvincing) hunchback henchman for Ze - of course! It’s about time! - a one-eyed strong-man and, later, as if from a spaghetti western, a small gang of hired assassins. As typical of any sequel, it goes for bigger and fuller: where once he murdered his wife cruelly with a single Spider in “Soul”, in “Corpse” he torments a handful of barely clad lovelies with a whole bunch of creepy-crawlies. Later, as he seduces the winner in this dubious lottery of who he will decide earns the right to bear his progeny, he will do so as he murders the losers with snakes. Such motifs, like the themes, are both consistent and repetitive troughout Marin’s films: the inclusion of the natural world at the service of male tyranny appears again and again, touching on our fears of the least popular of creatures and also a long history of their association with the demonic. It is not the natural world that thwarts Ze.

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Coffin Joe himself is quite an disturbing personification of misogyny and male arrogance, and although Marins is happy to film breasts whenever he can, the films feel more like criticism of masculinity’s malice and egotism. Similarly, Marins has suggested the films are condemnations of fascism and if one sees the Coffin Joe tales and the “Theory” episode of the anthology “The Strange World of Coffin Joe” as forerunners of Pasoloni’s “Salo”, we can see similar tricks being employed: self-indulgent and detached declarations of various theories about ‘perfection’, ‘superiority’, the death of “God” and so on, and how this leads to inhumanity, sadism, torture and slaughter. As polemics, Marin’s films may be clothed in exploitation and horror’s cheap thrills, but then so was the ostensibly more pedigreed “Salo”, and one could never doubt that Marin’s conviction or determination was any lesser than Pasolini’s.

From the colour sequence of hell from "This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse"

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As Joe has all the trimming and lordliness of aristocracy, it is easy to forget that he is just a coffin maker and gravedigger. Indeed, his delusion of supremacy is not one perpetuated by class but simply of his sociopathic and psychotic disdain for all others. To him, his pre-eminence is something like a cosmic given, and undisputable fact, and this greatness, tied so closely to machismo, must be passed on to progeny. If only he can find the right and worthy woman. Any hold of affection to his one apparent friend and romances are short-lived as soon as he feels slighted. Everyone else is wrong and his narcissism knows no bounds.

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Coffin Joe mocks the preternatural and he scorns both the Godly and the Satanic in equal measure; he is something far more primal and telling about man (and men). But inevitably, Coffin Joe must get his comeuppance and in both these early films, he has a born-again revelation and near redemption. It is the supernatural forces of divinity and vengeance rather than the natural world and his enemies that thwarts Ze. Is this, then, what Marins ultimately wants to say, that faith and God will prevail against corruption and cruelty? Or is this just another perversion… Coffin Joe finds God? Really? Doesn’t it feel like another black joke to close upon?

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But you can’t keep a good villain down, and it seems that Coffin Joe neither truly died nor found enlightenment. No, rather he comes back as the “Embodiment of Evil” (2008), forty (!) years later, his fingernails longer than ever. A flashback to this third entry reveals that the ending of “Corpse” was only half the story, and therefore somewhat a cheat. After forty years in jail, Coffin Joe is released into civility again to shake his head at Twenty-First century children puffing glue in the streets. As soon as Ze hurls his first accusation of the inferiority of others, we know he has not been rehabilitated at all. Indeed, he pontificates about chaos, death and the universe as he ever did and it’s all wonderfully amusing. He is also an unrehabilitated misogynist and egotist, still demanding women be worthy of his seed and child. He sees a coffin and coos. When he first meets his little gang of followers - put together by his loyal hunchback in his absence - he simply asks them “What is real? (Answer: Life, and nothing else) And after life? (answer: The continuity of blood, or oblivion). What is the fate of the inferior beings? (Answer: Destruction!) It is all wonderfully ludicrous and we see that we shall be in for the same mix of ambition, invention, unintentional humour and bouts of true surrealism and horror imagery..In “Embodiment”, Marins himself now has a more weathered face and arguably age suits his old barnstorming villainy well. No, he has not changed a bit: the long nails, the cape and top hat, it’s all there. Has Ze’s/Marin’s strain of high-Gothic horror now outdated by the movement of real, streetwise horrors that have since become the currency of contemporary horror? A horror out of time in the Twentieth Century? Perhaps not: he is an early and quite unique example of the franchising of villains, certainly unforgettable, and all his eye-gouging, torture and bizarre side-characters seem totally at home in contemporary horror. Marins was quite ahead of his time and a genuine b-horror auteur. “At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul” and “This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse” was only the start of the Coffin Joe-Marins phenomenon: in Brazil, Marins has had Ze front a TV horror series and a whole host of other horror films (to be covered in following articles), and it is with these that Marins’ fascination with social decay and psychedelia really come to the fore. They also often included a post-modern depiction of horror, and one that combined both horror’s melodramatic artifice and the streetwise. Coffin Joe’s wardrobe was always out-of-place and anachronistic. In “Embodiment”, Coffin Joe may seem a relic but he takes to the new explicitness and penchant for graphic torture with revived gusto: it is as if an old Boris Karloff scoundrel learnt all he needed to about horror from the golden age of Seventies banned titles. The torture sequences and gore reach new heights and few gorehounds will be disappointed: graphic scalpings, people hung by hooks, etc., etc. And we may enjoy his excesses, but there is never the sense that Ze do Caix is to be celebrated: he is vile and poisonous and crazed. He is an argument for order and restraint in a manic universe. For all his monologues and consideration of the universe, he is wrong because his behaviour is abhorrent and deluded.

Marins pulls it all off because he believes in the medium of horror and not just one facet or the other. His reliance upon the Coffin Joe persona throughout his career has been inspired rather than tired out, always searching around what the character and his own celebrity means and represents. “Soul,” “Corpse” and “Embodiment” may be the main story arc for Coffin Joe, but between and around them Marins has been remarkably prolific and fascinating.

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But there is a need to backtrack. These three films may be the main story arc for Coffin Joe, but he was busy elsewhere too. Marins has in the meantime made over 30 films and developed a television series, and so this is far from the end of the story.

Let Me In (further notes)

Firstly, I really like this promotional picture for "Let Me In". Probably better than the fingery one they finally went with. Simple, evocative and very much acting as if presenting a moment from the story that we never got to see (note the bare footprints).

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Kim Newman - that funky horror critic and about as cult celeb as critics get, one side of Mark Kermode - thinks that Reeves' "Let Me In" is a better horror film than "Let The Right One In" (see his Sight and Sound review). He feels that the American version's streamlining of all the ingrediants make it more focused, which is quite the opposite conclusion that I came to. It reduces the original novel and Swedish adaptation to a far more conventional genre piece.

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And slantmagazine's proposal that "Let Me In" is superior to "Let The Right One Is" is, well, just a remarkable misreading of what is conventional and what is not, and all but misses that Reeves borrows heavily from Alfredson's film when saying: "Reeves impresses his already jaded audience with stark images that reveal the story to be about impenetrability of the teenage mind, about finding a new language forged from exhausted images, and about combating inevitable world-weariness with fantastic violence and brutal romance." That is plainly wrong: go back to the original text and adaptation and it is there that you will find the transcendant images and "new language" if any. "Let Me In" is fun, but it ain't half as troubling, scathing and unique as the originals.

VALHALLA RISING

NICOLAS WINDING REFN
2009 - Denmark/UK

In some ways, “Valhalla Rising” feels like a debut from a director come from making experimental short films which have been successful due to a triumph of atmospherics hung upon an ambitious but thin story. Director Nicolas Winding Refn is in fact a Danish director that has a commendable list of films exploring male violence which are both naturalistic in characdterisation and given to stylistic tics: “Bleeder”, “Pusher” and its sequels, “Bronson”. “Valhalla Rising” is a superficially different beast, taking a Viking drama and conveying it through a fog of dour atmospherics and often pretty visuals; again, like a young director exceeding the limitations of budget by sheer aspiration and verve. And, like many student films, there is a certain uncertainty of performance, despite the experience of the cast, threatening to sabotage the illusion of a visit back through time. Viking dialogue - which is a chief weakness - is conveyed in low, undecided tones as opposed to what we might mostly be used to: those grand gestures and intonations of other historical epics. But, despite the visuals and the grand intentions of this journey into the heart of darkness, there is something in the space left around the dialogue that leaves it feeling weak and searching for a hold. Refn’s intention seems to be to produce a neo-realistic tone, but the performances seem un-buffered whenever dialogue is spoken. It feels adrift somewhere between Harmony Korine’s guerrilla aesthetic and Zack Snyder’s infamous “300” stylisation, with a reach for Werner Herzog and even Tarkovsky’s elemental fascination.

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Nevertheless, there is Mads Mikkelsen, who gives a wordless but magnetic performances that keeps the film grounded. Part ravaged hunk, part super-killing machine, an enslaved warrior robbed of one eye and his humanity. One-eye is kept caged and let out only to win fights: scarred up and seemingly forever on the verge of slaughtering anyone in front of him, initially his tale promises an study of the mystery and violence of this silent killing machine. The British Momentum Pictures promotional packaging uses cues familiar from Snyder’s “300”, giving the impression of a blood-soaked war epic with Mikkelsen leading a helmeted army, and none of which represents the film at all. Although “Valhalla Rising” is arguably just as stylised, it is far from the pulp absurdities of “300”. Almost all the gore and violence is up front in the film - including an unforgettable evisceration - for when One-Eye is free and we might presume a tale of extended wrath, he acquires a friendless boy (Maarten Stevenson) as a kind of spokesman and finds himself joined up with a small gang of crusading Christians. They are setting out to create a New Jerusalem - or rather, their apparent religious leader is and the others seem along for the promised treasures the conquered Holy Land will bring them.

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Then follows what may be, the gut-wrenching and bleak early passages aside, the film’s most successful sequence. The boat journey combines the elements of odyssey, otherworldiness, silence, naturalism and formal experimentation with pace, plotting and location that Refn otherwise struggles for elsewhere. Others may find this sequence interminable, for it is here that Refn goes from brooding, slow-paced doom with spasms of violence to a more dissonant sense of plot and increasingly abstract meaning. The claustrophobia of the boat is tangible, seemingly stranded in fog and undergoing a passage into another world as surely as the Bowman going through the light-show of “2001”.
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“Valhalla Rising” is an antidote to the bombast of so many other historical warrior epics. It is not grandiose like a Ridley Scott recreation; it’s visuals and beauty rely not upon set-design but the natural world, the foggy mountains and damp rock faces, the doomy and drained landscapes, accompanied by a heavily ambient soundtrack. It is a brief tale: gaining his freedom as a slave for fighting, One-Eye goes to hell, those around him find nothing and go to pieces, and he finally meets red Devils. It is a exercise in anti-climax, a heart of darkness that goes nowhere and probably signifies very little. Had Refn lost many of its modern stylistic affectations, it may have headed in the direction of, for example, “The Valley of the Bees” in recreating a long lost era in a realistic manner. Nevertheless, for all its flaws, “Valhalla Rising” remains a fascinating experiment throughout.

The Best Things I watched in 2010

An end of year list - of course! Here is a run down of the films that I found hit the mark with me, excelled, etc. Some are new, some are old... 25 favourites in no particular order:

1. Where the Wild Things Are - (Spike Jonz, USA, 2009)
2. The Road - (John Hillcoat, USA, 2009)
3. A Prophet - (Jacques Audiard, France/Italy, 2009)
4. Kick-Ass - (Matthew Vaughn, USA, 2010)
5. A Serious Man - (Coen brothers, 2009, USA/UK/France)
6. Afterschool - (Antonia Campos, USA, 2008)
7. The House of the Devil - (Ti West, USA, 2009)
8. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs - (Phil Lord & Chris Miller, 2009)
9. Lake Tahoe - (Fernando Eimbcke, Meixco/Japan/USA, 2008)
10. Do You Remember Dolly Bell? - (Emir Kusturica, Yugoslavia, 1981)
11. Martyrs - (Pascal Laugier, France/Canada, 2008)
12. Diamonds of the Night / Démanty noci - (Jan Nemec, Czechoslovackia, 1964)
13. A Swedish Love Story / En kärlekshistoria - (Roy Andersson, Sweden, 1970)
14. Valley of the Bees / Údolí vcel - (Frantisek Vlácil, Czechoslovackia, 1968)
15. The Cremator / Spalovac mrtvol - (Juraj Herz, Czechoslovackia, 1969)
16. Libero (Along the Ridge) / Anche libero va bene - (Kim Rossi Stuart, Italy, 2006)
17. The Bridge / Die Brücke - (Bernhard Wicki, West Germany, 1959)
18. Box (Three... Extremes) - (Takashi Miike, Japan, 2004)
19. Picnic at Hanging Rock - (Peter Weir, Australia, 1975)
20. Valerie and her week of wonders / Valerie a týden divu - (Jaromil Jires, Czechoslovachia, 1970)
21. Barry Lyndon - (Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1975)
22. House of Voices / Santa Ange - (Pascal Laugier, France, 2004)
23. Waltz With Bashir / Vals im Bashir - (Ari Folman, Israel (et al.), 2008)
24. The White Ribbon / Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte - (Michael Haneke, 2008, Germany (et al.), 2009)
25. Deadwood - (TV: all of it)

What have I learnt from this list? That I apparently discovered the Czech new wave in a big way and that I obviously think Pascal Laugier is one fine horror director.

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And ten more of note that I liked or found of note -

Scott Pilgrim Versus The World

We Are What We Are

Four Lions

La Antea

Life During Wartime

The Girl Next Door

In The Loop

Pontypool

Moon

My Way Home / Így jöttem

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And the worst that I saw this year... and yes, they are horror films.

The Unborn

Pirahna 3-D

Death Tunnel

Where The Wild Things Are

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

Spike Jonz, 2009, USA

A work of staggering furry near-genius.

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Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s much loved and brief book engages with the unnerving freedom and aggression of Max’s free-fall play from the very first minutes, as he chases the dog around the house, like a delirious hunter. The handheld camera follows and jumps around with him and the effect is dizzying, liberating, and just a bit scary. This opening and the following drama surrounding Max’s snow fort capture the ups and downs of play effortlessly ~ play makes you high and when it doesn’t go as you want it to, it’s throws you low. The magic of Jonze’s film is that it never, ever losing sight of the pell-mell violence behind rough-and-tumble play: at any minute, it might go horribly wrong.

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The dog is okay, but Max’s snow fort does not fare so well, and neither does his mother. In a tantrum of attention-seeking and jealousy, Max bites her and, apparently horrified at his own behaviour, sets out on his own odyssey from the house to sort himself out. Even the journey to the island of the Wild Things is fraught with peril: the waves threaten to toss his little boat and drown him. The dangers of Max’s world all seem very real and likely, all larger than life and exaggerated. Upon meeting the Wild Things, his friendship with them and Max’s hold on them by proclaiming himself a king always seems precariously ready to end up in something terrible due to any of their unpredictable mood-swings and penchant for aggressive play. The Wild Things themselves embody a whole host of difficult, affectionate and fraught relationships: immediate family; a gang of new friends; various facets of Max’s own personality. The Wild Thing Carol seems most to represent Max’s temper and destructiveness as well as an immature father-figure. Has a bunch of giant puppets ever been so dangerously temperamental and morose? They are all like Sesame Street muppets in need of therapy and anti-depressants. As special effects The Wild Things are a mixture of real costumes and CGI tweaking, and are remarkable and scary in their size and physicality. They smash, they wreck, they tear chunks out of trees, they throw one another around without sense of consequence.

 

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It is like a grunge film for pre-teens. The soundtrack by Karen O and the Kids amplifies this feeling: it surely won’t be to everyone’s taste but it’s an often jubilant, crash, strum and shout accompaniment that relates well to Max’s energy. The work of the voice actors, all seasoned professionals, is also exemplary: James Gandolfini especially uses his very nasally, snorty and sighing voice to excellent effect for Carol’s sulkiness. Jonz captures Max Records as Max at just the right moment, encouraging a wonderfully open, fluid performance. It is free from the brattishness and knowingness of so many trained American child performers. When he declares nonchalantly “I have no plans to eat anyone today,” it is irresistible. He throws both a great temper and confused remorse, both totally in thrall to and nervous of the monster-sized character traits around him. Max maybe isn’t the all-scowling tearaway of Sendak’s book, but he is a more fully rounded, conflicted, variable character: by turns needy, volatile, sweet, unthinkingly mean, et cetera. He is as dwarfed by the intimidating moods-wings, judgements and needs of the Wild Things as he is by his need to play and to be the kind and the centre of attention. Rarely does Jonz miss the child’s eye perspective and feel of his surroundings: even when the monsters bundle into a mountain on top of him, the dangerous claustrophobia is tangible and, wonderfully, Jonz turns the bundle into tunnels that Max crawls through. Just like a fort.

Jonz and Eggers draw a clear line between the troubling relationship between creativity and destructiveness: it is not mistake that Carol is the most artistic. Where does one end and the other begin? When does play become dangerous? Where does neediness end and selfishness take over? How, indeed, to find the compromise between all these things? In the end, Max has worked as much out as he can for himself and, as he leaves to go home and start over afresh and, we would hope, wiser and more controlled, all that is left is a gorgeous, plaintive, primal howl. Well, until Max goes home barking at the dogs in the yards. And he is still wearing the wolf suit. You have to stay yourself, after all.

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A farewell love letter to temper tantrums.

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A film for kids that treats a kid’s irrational temper with respect.

TRON

Stephen Lisberger - 1982 - USA

Although I never actually saw “Tron” when it first came out, I was still mesmerised by its look. I was in possession of one of those novelisations, the movie tie-in, inevitably adapted by Alan Dean Foster, which was bisected by a few glossy pages of stills from the movie. It was from those stills that I discovered “Tron’s” distinct look; the luminous blues and reds mostly. Of course, when I finally saw “Tron” for the first time as an adult, I was instantaneously disappointed in the somewhat lukewarm script, and a story that had seemed so much more threatening in the captions beneath those book stills which implied dark corporate intrigue and gaming adventure. The actual film is a far frothier affair. “Tron” suffers from that weakness that undermines many a special effects extravaganzas: fascinating and original big sci-fi concepts and contexts given to a recourse to the flimsiest of storylines that draw from tired tropes and stock characters (from “Logan’s Run” to “Avatar”, etc.) . Yet the look remains sumptuous, timeless and fascinating. And not forgetting that, apart from the visual aesthetic, “Tron’s” greatest achievement is the possession of an all-time great action and sci-fi sequence with the legendary bike race.

Atari had barely made the promise of things to come when “Tron” created a world where the players become their virtual counterparts. Avatars and virtual identities allow us all that, perhaps without the cool glow-in-the-dark costumes and Frisbee hats, but also without the risk of being wiped out by a megalomaniac, demon-faced computer system. Critic John Brosnan probably misses the point in his taking the “Tron” to task for being illogical and unscientific:

“True, video games are controlled by computer chips, but that is no reason to suggest that the internal workings of a computer would be visually analogous to those of a video game.” [1]

There’s worth to this criticism, should you be looking for plausibility, but it bypasses the fact that, narratively, “Tron” draws far more from fantasy and fairy-tale conventions than from science-fiction: the lone warrior drawn into an alternative reality to defeat a seemingly omnipotent overlord; ‘magical’ weapons and steeds; an odyssey across an incredible otherworld - all these are the fantasy tropes that pulp science-fiction long ago adopted. They are the devices and props for the adventure and one would search in vain for “Tron” to be considered as hard science-fiction and the exploration of what science might give to us (as, say, “2001: a space odyssey” might). “Tron” barely skates the trite Good versus Evil dilemmas of the “Star Wars” franchise, and it is not overburden with ridiculous and vacuous philosophical affectations of the “Matrix” series, but the similarities of appearance between the real and virtual world does give “Tron” faint allegorical pretensions. Everything from inside the computer to the genuine cityscapes, and even the gliding point-of-view searching camera in the arcade, all share the same computer-game aesthetic. The world, “Tron” says with its overall look, is one big computer chip or grid, and were are but players and programmes, etc. It does at least give the sense that we are dwarfed not only by technology but also be the products of our imaginations, and entertainments. The danger of technology is also prevalent in the Master Computer MCP’s ambitions to take over the world and run it better than the humans, joining the ranks of megalomaniac computers such as those from “The Forbin Project” and “Demon Seed” and many, many others. The idea that computers (and robots, etc.) will achieve total sentience is another science-fiction fetish that in truth speaks more of human beings tendency to anthropomorphising the truly inhuman.

Brosnan goes on to berate the method that transforms players into their cyber-counterparts: a laser that allows the computer to store molecules and reassemble them into their original form. I doubt that any sci-fi kid worth his salt would truly buy this as probable in a second. Any kid knows this is pseudo-science, that it is a just techno-babbling means of allowing the real kick that “Tron” promises: the promise that, tomorrow!, we will be able to BE those characters in those fantastically virtual beautiful worlds of heroism and adventure, not to mentioned the unleashed Id (but we are a long way from the failing realities of “Videodrome”, “eXistenZ” and Philip K. Dick here). Were the creators of “Tron” really ignorant of the science or simply patronising the young audience, Brosnan asks? Well that audience knew exactly how “Tron” logic worked: it is the same Olympian magic that allows the Gods to animate giant steel statues, to transfer Chosen Ones from one world to the next, and, say, for E.T. to breathe Earth oxygen without trouble. For the thrill of hard, plausible science, you would have to look elsewhere.

The far more interesting question is what the hell Jeff Bridges is doing in there? He has one awesomely dated and unintentionally funny moment when he rolls into the arcade, fastest player in town, and then proceeds to kick ass on a game that runs at the speed of a tractor. If the internal world of “Tron” graphics still manages to seem somewhat ageless, this opening arcade sequence reminds us of how far the gaming and virtual world actual have come.

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Nevertheless, we do live in a world where Tron, the character, and all his associates and enemies, have had their own MySpaces. So do the characters of “Back to the Future”, “Child’s Play” and a whole bundle of other cult and classic films I haven’t even ventured to look up yet (I myself am friends with Mr. Barlow, for example.) The adoption and merging of real and pop culture identities, character transference, projection, the world of surrogates and avatars, must be enough to power a hundred university modules. Be friends with Tron and enjoy the groovy neon colours of his MySpace! (… and of course, MySpace itself seems increasingly retro and by the time you read this, it probably is, if not dead and gone.)

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What Disney thought it was investing in is baffling… wait, no, what about all those tie-in “Tron” games? “Tron” was undoubtedly considered a children’s film. It was a new dawn, when films still inspired computer/arcade games as a rule and not vice versa and the crossover potential was still barely realised. The look and reality-jumping promises offered in “Tron” has far exceeded its malnourished concept and screenplay. “Tron” is like a great band with a weak front man. Even as the visuals try for subtext in presenting everything as a gamescape, the terrible pacing and exposition does its best to kill off elements such as suspense and brilliant reveals: e.g., we get to see the bikes before any kind of plot has even occurred so that the sequence mostly exits autonomously rather than driving narrative.

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What remains is that even after the meteoric development of special effects, not to mention CGI, the “Tron” design still remains pretty much unique. It looks like a silent black and white sci-fi, coloured in with fluorescent pen, which is again a clue to its agelessness: it looks as if it spans centuries of cinema, then and now, and in that way transcends the limitations and passé design of its proposed future look for game systems. Just look at the poster that heads this article: see the silent-screen clasp of the romantic interest; how old-fashioned it is and how it is projected into a vision of the future. And it is very pretty. An example of look overcoming content.

[1] (John Brosnan, The Primal Screen: a History of Science-Fiction Film, Orbit, Macdonald & Co, 1991, pg. 350)

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE

Jorge Michel Grau,
2010, Mexico

---- Although comparisons between films is often just a flip manner in which to cash in on another’s reputation, as well as critical shorthand, it is easy to see why “We are What we Are” has been dubbed the Mexican “Let The Right One In”. It’s because both films are interested in their protagonists’ emotional, home-baked relationship to the horror they are involved in: the horrors are tied to more mundane daily anxieties and barely repressed angers, alienation, poverty and needs. The concentration on the domestic is vital: one of the terrors of “We Are What We Are” is surely how bleak the household of our cannibal family is; how devoid of any culture other than ‘the ritual’, how blank the walls, how limited the family appears to be in experience. They apparently spend all their time sitting around brooding, doing nothing, squabbling, or preparing for the kill.

When their father drops dead from a poisoning in a shopping mall - the mall staff drag him away and wipe up after him: it’s a broad but nonetheless effective symbol of the disposability of the poor - the wife, two sons and daughter that he leaves behind are thrown into turmoil. Family dynamics become strained: a fight for dominance between the matriarch and the eldest son; the rivalry between the more thoughtful and empathic elder son and his younger sibling; the careful manipulations of the daughter/sister, who proves to be the real force behind the family in light of mother’s insanity and the brother’s volatile and insecure natures.

Later, the eldest son’s other secret surfaces: we follow him as he shadows an openly gay man and his friends to a club in perhaps the film’s best sequence, revealing a colourful, pounding, liberated world that he has barely ever seen. His first pursuit and taste of another identity seems to come as a revelation. Inevitably, allegiance to the family overrides all, and the general ineptitude and emotional issues of the family weakens their ability to keep a grip on things.

There is even a moment of pure farce when the eldest son brings his first victim home, only to find his mother already has one in the bed. Slowly, the violence increases and distresses and the gore comes full on. The film works on a slow burn: we have had a clue as to how abominable their practices are when the brothers first attempt and fail to kidnap a child, but by the end we are in no doubt how horrific their ritual actually is. If it all ends typically in grand guignol style, it is not surprising, probably needing to lay bare the awfulness of their oppressive lifestyle and cannibalism. Additionally, as if to drive home how the desperate become monster types, the local prostitutes seemingly become a gang of zombies, moving in upon the family to exact their own revenge. Elsewhere, the police are bumbling, boorish and given to slapstick.

“We Are What We Are” casts a bleak and blackly humorous world in grainy low-budget style that has seemed so suited to horror since the Roger Corman quickies, through “Night of the Living Dead” and “.Rec”. Grau's film is llikely to be a minor cult classic, and probably exactly the kind of thing getting commentators envisioning a new wave of Mexican horror. But it is focused, resting upon its broad tying-in of horror and poverty motifs, mounting dread and a number of fine set-pieces.