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The PopMatters Film Blog
Twilight’s Gender Divide
Is Twilight backlash a result of its predominantly female fan base?
In an article on Prospect.org, writer Sady Doyle posits that the backlash against the wildly popular Twilight series of books and film adaptations isn’t so much based on the poor writing, overwrought performances and anti-feminist message, as it is on the fact that its fan base is almost exclusively female.
Doyle concedes the series’ many faults, but also points out that Twilight engenders a different kind of derision than nerdy fan-boy fare.
“Twilight is more than a teen dream. It’s a massive cultural force. Yet the very girliness that has made it such a success has resulted in its being marginalized and mocked. Of course, you won’t find many critics lining up to defend Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, either; mass-market success rarely coincides with literary acclaim. But male escapist fantasies—which, as anyone who has seen Die Hard or read those Tom Clancy novels can confirm, are not unilaterally sophisticated, complex, or forward-thinking—tend to be greeted with shrugs, not sneers. The Twilight backlash is vehement, and it is just as much about the fans as it is about the books. Specifically, it’s about the fact that those fans are young women.”
It’s an interesting take on the Twilight phenomenon—one that I hadn’t really considered because, well, there are plenty of perfectly valid reasons to scorn Twilight: the central message of the story aimed at teen girls seems to be that if you really, really, really like a boy, you should seriously consider giving up your soul for him. Franchise stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson spend most of their time together onscreen staring dolefully at each other for interminable stretches. Author Stephenie Meyer never met an adjective she didn’t like and her prose is uniformly awful. (The sentence, “He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare,” simply should not occur in the English language. Ever.) Gender issues aside, all of this makes the series ripe for mocking.
Still, it’s undeniable that entertainment aimed specifically at women is often relegated to a fluffy, pink ghetto. For years, I listened to male friends carp about the vapidity and silliness of Sex and The City, although it never occurred to them that their beloved Entourage was essentially the same show re-packaged and targeted to a different gender. Doyle raises a good point in questioning whether Harry Potter would have been such a universally embraced phenomenon if it had a more feminine perspective.
I may not understand theTwilight obsession, but I can empathize with it. After all, I was once a 16-year-old who saw Titanic three times in the theater. I know a little something about falling head-over-heals for a cinematic hero who is tailor-made to appeal to adolescent girls and bored housewives.
What is also undeniable is that The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the second installment in the saga, made $140 million last weekend—the third highest opening ever behind The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3. If there were any lingering questions, it’s now clear that the vampire-loving ladies now have just as much power to set the cultural agenda as the superhero-worshipping lads.
The rest of us had better either get on board, or get out of the way.
—Meghan Lewit
2:11 pm
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All Pain, No Gain: ‘Precious’ vs. ‘The Road’
Warning: Massive Spoilers Ahead
We don’t always need a happy ending. In art, as in life, situations rarely play out perfectly, or painlessly, or fairly. Indeed, anguish makes up the very fabric of existence, and it’s a cloth few of us want to wear willingly. So when one imitates the other, it doesn’t always have to be pretty. Or enjoyable. Or cathartic. No, a modern, contemporary audience should be able to deal with the dark, the dour, or the depressing with relative ease. After all, it’s part of our individual make-up, the manner in which we typically trudge through everyday life.
But two current films are really pushing the limits of viable entertainment misery. Both are based on famous novels, and both feature brave individuals attempted to survive under the most heinous of conditions. A few weeks back, Lee Daniels drama of unholy urban blight, Precious, rocked viewers with its tale of child abuse and social disenfranchisement. In it, the title character suffers through horrific sexual, physical, and psychological abuse while trying to find a way out of her dead end situation. And this week, we see the arrival of John Hillcoat’s bleak adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning tome The Road. Dealing with a nameless father and son who are traversing a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, it’s a journey through starvation, cannibalism, and the desperate will to survive.
While both of these films couldn’t be more different in setting and story, each shares a startling spiritual similarity with the other. Both begin in horrific ways, placing our leads in personality-defining peril. Each then moves them through more and more torment - for Precious, it’s beatings at the hands of her worthless welfare mother; for the duo in The Road it’s the threat of disease, violence, and death. Halfway through, a sort of sanctuary is discovered. For Precious, it’s Ms. Blu Rain’s special school. For The Road‘s Father and Son, it’s an abandoned fall out shelter loaded with supplies. In each circumstance, a small glimmer of hope is established, a chance for each one of these put-upon souls to finally breakout and live, if only for a little. Then, a last act a-bomb of illness drops. Precious is diagnosed with HIV. The Road’s patriarch appears to be suffering from some terminal lung ailment and grows weaker and weaker until…
By the time they end, each film using the status quo as a statement of austere, undeniable everyday realism, hope has been quashed and all we can wish for is a significantly less amount of pain before the characters pass - and even then, neither narrative offers a guarantee. It’s the starkness of each statement (Precious will be another grave government statistic, the Boy may find another to care for him, but there’s little optimism in this rapidly dying world) that renders both Precious and The Road into tough emotional rollercoasters. By their very nature, tragedies are supposed to provide catharsis, a chance for the audience, through the events and their depiction, to purge themselves of the feelings fostered by the stories. Instead, both Precious and The Road sink under your skin, bothering you with their lack of humanity and undying sense of futility. And it’s an effective approach that’s hard to shake.
Perhaps if they functioned as metaphor or allegory, maybe if they weren’t such onerous predictions of how people will de-evolve under the harshest of conditions, we’d find a way to make each film function as entertainment. Again, film doesn’t have to be all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, but it doesn’t have to be all rape, human sacrifice, and mutilation either. Or worse, it doesn’t have to lack a valid point within its atrocity. We will easily accept the desolate and the pessimistic if the message behind the wretchedness is clear. But in both films, there’s no clear counterbalance. All they offer is crime without any possibility of punishment - and then they toss in more wrongs to up the level of loss.
Take Precious, for example. This overweight teen is already dealing with the terrifying social prejudices produced by a country that doesn’t care about minorities. Indeed, she is seen as wallowing through a system that offers some compassion but little resolve. The character of Ms. Weiss, expertly essayed by singer Mariah Carrey, can only be as helpful as the bureaucracy she’s saddled with. When Precious really needs a friend - or even better, a savior - there are none available, present or possible. She’s not just mandated to suffer - she’s preselected to do so.
The Road is no better. Father has done everything he can to teach his neophyte child (a kid born after Armageddon and therefore unaware of the true nature of people) about trust and defense, and yet at every step, said strictures are tested. During one incomprehensibly nasty scene, the duo come across a human slaughterhouse - people herded like cattle in a basement pit, parts of their bodies removed or missing for the “butchers” who keep them there as captives - and food supply. The child doesn’t get it. Later on, when Father confronts a black man who he believes has been following him (and did indeed steal from them), he strips him naked in the freezing nuclear winter weather and leaves him to the elements. While his son wants to help, all Dad can do is rear back like a caged animal and defend his “territory”.
In both cases, the message is clear: “Give up all Hope Ye Who Enter Here!” Thankfully, the acting in both films is so fantastic, so nuanced and intricate that we accept the deliberate dire straights and are thoroughly engaged. But then the sneaky suspicious that all this suffering has been for naught comes crawling back to the fore. It’s almost impossible to escape the conclusion. After all, what has Precious learned? That life sucks? That her mom hates her for “stealing” her man (how the woefully misguided matriarch rationalizes the several rapes of her child)? That even the system build to protect her, can’t? That she’ll eventually die from an STD that was forced upon her and her child? Or how about the pair from The Road? That they are a constant source of food for the rest of the dying world? That nowhere is safe and nothing should be taken for granted? That humanity will turn into vicious, amoral monsters the minute normal protocol breaks down? That the next war will be the last? That the world, like its population, is dying for the final time?
Again, no one needs these films to find a happy way of wrapping up their stories. No one is asking that Precious find a man who loves her, or a loving home to take her in, or even a cure for her progressive disease. No one is asking for her mother to be jailed, her father to be castrated, or her social workers to be chastised for not finding a solution to her sad dilemma in the first place. Similarly, we don’t want Father to live, to discover a new civilized community along the shoreline of the Pacific Northwest, or raise his son to be the next President of the New United States. But what we don’t want - nay DEMAND - is a reason to go along with such suffering. We can gain enough torment from our own lives to create such a sour simulation. We don’t need an artform known for casting a reflection on the world to remind us of how unconscionably awful it is. Both Precious and The Road offer all pain and no gain. For some, that’s perfectly fine. Many will want a little more meaning in their misery.
—Bill Gibron
10:00 pm
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Adventure is ‘Up’ There: A Talk with Pixar’s Pete Docter and Bob Peterson
Inspiration can come from the most unlikely of places. Artists of all kind find their muse in music, memories, or even some of the more minor things that life has to offer. For Bob Peterson, co-director and voice actor in the Pixar’s latest masterwork Up, the source for Carl Fredrickson’s journey to Paradise Falls in commemoration of his late wife, and the undeniable derring-do that follows, came from a source rather close to home.
“I had a grandfather who always wanted to go West from Ohio, but never got the chance,” said the animator during a recent virtual junket to promote the four disc DVD/Blu-ray release of the Summer blockbuster, arriving 10 November. “I had the foresight to videotape my grandparent’s home after they had passed 20 years ago. There are the side by side chairs - one soft and one hard which absolutely paralleled who they were as people. Many of our life experiences with our wives and children were put into play in the (Up) script, and of course living with our dogs gave us great insight into dog behavior!”
Indeed, Up‘s multi-layered narrative, which sees a disgruntled old man (voiced flawlessly by Ed Asner) tie balloons to his home in order to satisfying his spouse’s dying wish, is more than just a story of aging. It’s a reflection of our current social structure, as when chubby little stowaway Russell describes his life without his dad. It’s a rollicking cartoon entertainment, with our two human characters running into Kevin, a fascinating bird, and Dug, a dog who can speak English thanks to a voice translator on his collar. While the main plot has Carl meeting up with longtime hero Charles Muntz and discovering the true meaning of “adventure”, there are dozens of equally enthralling elements battling for significance, turning an already winning film into something akin to a classic. And it all started with inspiration and ideas.
More than a few did come from an unusual outside source, adds fellow co-director Pete Docter. “We had referenced Tom McCarthy’s film The Station Agent as we worked out the structure of Up. It’s very similar.” The man behind Pixar’s classic Monsters, Inc. had the filmmaker come to the company and screen his film. When Peterson got called away to work on Ratatouille, Docter felt rudderless. “I needed someone to spark off creatively”, he said, “and so I asked Tom if he could recommend any writers he knew that might want to work on the film. He said, “How about me?” McCarthy was on Up for three months, and it was in his draft that the character of Russell the Wilderness Ranger was born.
But Up was more than just a collection of collaborations and recollections. As the flawless new digital release shows, the animators traveled far and wide to grapple with some of the more challenging locational problems. During the “Adventure is Out There” featurette, Docter, Peterson, and several of the creative crew traveled to South America to camp out among actual tepui - monolith like mountains that jut out of the Earth like forgotten frontiers from mythic times - in Venezuela. It was quite an experience, one that easily tied into other developing aspects of the film.
“We looked at the grand adventurers of the last century including Lindbergh,” said Peterson, explaining how villain Charles Muntz came into being. “We looked at Howard Hughes, being a sort of inventor/adventurer. We also looked at photos of Errol Flynn and even the dapper photos of Walt Disney in the 1930’s with his pencil thin mustache.” But there is always more to a Pixar film than look and design. “We approach our writing exactly as one would approach a live- action screen play,” says Docter. “The focus is on character and keeping the audience engaged.”
Indeed, it seems the long sought after secret of the CG animation giant’s success is as simple as being true to what you create. Docter explained that “the story called for Carl to float his house into the air buoyed by balloons. For that to be believable, we felt it would be necessary to caricature the world—and therefore the characters as well.” It was then that head artist Rick Nierva developed a kind of primary shape personality for each individual player. “A cube is not something that rolls or moves fast - it is very stable - perfect for Carl,” says Peterson. “A circle can roll and move fast - great for Russell. The more realistic we go with our characters, the less appealing they become because humans have the great ability to discern what is real in a human face and what is not.”
Similarly, Muntz was given a diamond shaped head, the better to reflect his lifelong sense of defeat. “If Carl is represented by a square shape,” he continues, “as far as shape language, Muntz is a ‘collapsed square.’ He ends up having more diamond shapes as if a square has collapsed upon itself.” Of course, not everything is so far removed from the real world. “We knew we wanted to give Carl a new family including a new ‘grandson’ and ‘family dog,’ said Peterson, “it was a gauntlet laid down in front of him to accept new people into his life.” Being ardent pet lovers, the duo wanted to make sure that their value as companions was featured prominently. “Dug’s undying and immediate canine love ‘I have just met you and I love you,’ and ‘I was under your porch because I love you’ is an indirect lesson for Carl that love is always around him, if he will only accept it.”
Indirectly, the duo wanted to make sure that any jump to 3D would not hurt the heart of their story. “The process for Up started in 2D,” Docter points out, “again with the focus just on the story and the characters. It was about three years in that John Lasseter (Pixar pioneer) came to us and said, ‘Hey, there are some really cool new developments that have happened with 3D.’” The company had a long history of interest in the format, so as usual, a long and arduous research process resulting in a compromise.
“We made a list of things we liked and things we didn’t,” he explains. “I wanted to use 3D in a more subtle way than the usual, ‘WOAH! THERE’S A BIG BANANA CREAM PIE COMING OUT TOWARDS THE AUDIENCE!’ thing you often see in 3D. We used 3D as another tool to communicate the emotion of the scene, like you would use color, lighting, or cinematography. In the end, we didn’t let it affect the way we approached the story at all. I didn’t want to compromise the 2D version—which is the way it will be seen most often (considering DVD and Blu-ray).”
In fact, what’s clear from talking to Docter and Peterson as well as the extensive behind the scenes material on the new home video release is how much material is mulled over, worked through, sweated over, and then eventually discarded. There is a hidden feature on the Blu-ray which discusses an unused subplot involving Muntz, the exotic rainbow colored bird Kevin, and the creature’s magical eggs. Instead of pursing the beast to prove he’s not a fraud (as in the final film), the former cultural icon discovers the fountain of youth inside each one. Deemed “too magical”, the idea got as far as the storyboard phase before it was tossed aside. Indeed, there is probably several films worth of brainstorms and bad approaches lying around Pixar’s virtual cutting room floor.
This didn’t mean Up didn’t take chances. The somber opening montage explaining Carl and Ellie’s life together remains one of the most risky - and memorable - sequences in any animated film. “My parents shot a lot of Super 8 movies of our family growing up,” Docter explains. “Watching them now, there’s something really emotional about not having any sound. That allows, I think, the audience to participate more actively and kind of imagine.” It was Peterson who came up with most of the material, but when Ronnie del Carmen started to storyboard it, the pair felt like it would be nice to reduce it, simplify it, and take the dialogue out - yet another example of Pixar’s spit and polish approach to their titles.
Of course, like any filmmakers, Docter and Peterson weren’t sure what they had until they screened the film for cast and crew at the wrap party. “We don’t ever get to see our movies like a regular audience member because we lived through the creation of the film and see the memories brought forward by each shot and movement we see,” they argue. “Those memories are there. When our movies leave us we hope we’ve given them enough love and sense to do great things in the world!!” With Up, the achievement and almost universal acclaim more than speaks for itself.
—Bill Gibron
3:20 pm
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The Definitive Horror Music Collection
The best horror films become iconic for several reasons. They offer up monsters or murderers who are insidiously memorable. They provide violence and visions of death that chill the very marrow in your bones. They provide a sense of dread that lingers long under your skin. And they provide nightmare (and daydream) fodder for days to come. They also thrive on the aural aspect of the genre, given over to thunderclaps and banshee shrieks, guttural growls and creaky wooden doors. There’s also the music - eerie, unnerving sounds that shiver the soul while suggesting the creepshow content within. Now Silva Screen Music has put together a four CD, 60 track set of some of the greatest horror (and sci-fi) movie themes of all time. While the title considers this compilation “definitive”, there are definitely some gaps (and gasps…and gaffs) along the way.
Setting itself up to work backwards chronologically, we begin with the rather uninspired selection of 2009 - 2001. There we see such unusual choices as the gorgeous “Eli’s Theme” from the Swedish masterpiece Let the Right One In and the equally sublime “The Labyrinth” from Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. There’s Sunshine‘s ambient “Adagio in D Minor” and another Danny Boyle selection, “In the House - In a Heartbeat” from the edgy 28 Days Later. But then we have to put up with the syrupy tripe known as Twilight (“Edward at Her Bed (Bella’s Lullaby)”) as well as the oddly out of place cinematic cheerleading of the “Main Theme” for The Mummy Returns. Again, when put up against Drag Me to Hell (“End Titles (Original Version)”) or “This is Going to Hurt” from The Ring, something like “Roar” (From Cloverfield) or “King Kong Suite” (from Peter Jackson’s remake) seems odd.
It’s a sticky situation that remains throughout most of the remaining discs. 1999-1984 will provide glimpses of genius like “Suite” from Hellraiser or “Dance of the Witches” from The Witches of Eastwick alongside more Mummy nonsense (“The Sand Volcano/Love Theme”), a dose of disco-fied drek (the main theme for They Live, not one of John Carpenter’s best), and the thoroughly action-oriented “Prelude/Ripley’s Rescue” from Aliens. Of course, many of the same melodic cues were used when Hellraiser II: Hellbound was conceived, so including that here seems redundant, and both the main theme from Predator and “The Carousel/End Titles” from The Haunting are less than memorable indeed. In fact, when one thinks about the 15 years represented on this CD, of the myriad of horror movies made during this time, the exclusions make the inclusions all the more questionable.
At least the next disc, 1983 - 1977 gets its mostly right. The first eight tracks alone - “Main Theme”: Nightmare on Elm Street; “Bad to the Bone”: Christine, “Main Theme"s from Poltergeist, The Thing, Halloween II and The Fog, “The Gallery”: Dressed to Kill, and “Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta” from The Shining all live up to the collection title hype. Even later on, the original Halloween theme, as well as selections from Phantasm, Suspiria, and The Fury, fill out the musical mandates of what makes for memorable horror movie scoring. It almost makes up for the languid elusiveness of “Main Theme/The Storm” from the Frank Langella version of Dracula, or the shockingly silly material used in the sequel to one of the greatest films of all time, The Exorcist (Exorcist II: The Heretic‘s “Regan’s Theme.)
Naturally, the biggest leap comes with the fourth CD. There, instead of traveling back six, fifteen, or eight years, we go from 1976 to 1922 - five and a half decades! There’s just no way any anthology, no matter how smartly put together, can cover over half a century of horror. Indeed, the missing material from some of the best ‘50s schlock is all but absent, as is a great deal of what some would call “classic” fright night selections. Sure, we get Nosferatu (“Overture”), Bride of Frankenstein (“Creation of the Female Monster”), and Dracula (“Main Title/Finale”), and Horrors of the Black Museum is a nice treat. But suddenly we jump to the original Haunting (“The History of Hill House”), Rosemary’s Baby (“Lullaby”) and Taste the Blood of Dracula (“The Young Lovers/ Ride to the Ruined Church”). Granted, you can’t deny the evil majesty of “Tubular Bells”, or “Ave Satan” from The Omen, but instead of expanding the set another couple of discs, covering so much content in such a small dose is disrespectful to the genre and the art of film composition.
Still, for its many misgivings and missteps, The Definitive Horror Music Collection is a heady hit or miss treat. There’s no getting around the fact that many of these movie moments have become part of the social fabric, that when we hear the discordant notes of the Halloween theme, or the demonic menace of the Hellraiser scores, we can’t help but be whisked back to the seminal scary sequences from each film. Even better, there are some forgotten gems among the more recognizable turns, including the wicked ways of Phantasm and Carpenter’s Village of the Damned update. Still, it would have been nice to hear more Goblin, especially their work for George Romero in Dawn of the Dead, and would it have hurt to include more foreign films. Of the 60 titles presented, we get more TV themes and sci-fi/action film findings than macabre outside the US mainstream (and don’t even mention that lack of B-movie fare from the likes of AIP, Roger Corman, and during the direct to video days, Charles Band).
As a primer for how powerful movie music can be, for a lesson in how certain themes and melodies can instantly bring back memories of a specific filmmaker or film, The Definitive Horror Music Collection is a wonderful if incomplete overview. Sure, we don’t need reminders of Dexter or TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the lack of historical context (and Hitchcock, for that matter) could be seen as criminal. Still, for the novice fright fan, new to the genre and desperate for a look at where sound stands in the creation of fear, this is a fascinating compendium. While not quite as authoritative as the label suggests, this is still an excellent scary movie souvenir.
—Bill Gibron
3:29 pm
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Zombiefied: ‘Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers: The Producer’s Cut’
Perhaps no one cared because it was the sixth installment in an already waning franchise. It could be that director Joe Chapelle and writer Daniel Farrands weren’t as noted (or notorious) as cock rock star Rob Zombie. Maybe the notion of revisiting or a remake was more contentious that simply dragging a cash cow out of the cinematic stable for one more mostly unnecessary milking. Whatever it was, it’s amazing that there wasn’t more press generated over the completely cuckoo version of the monster myth generated by Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Even today, few find fault with this avant-garde goof. Taking on all aspects of the origin story, from where “The Shape” got his urge to kill to the significantly surreal reasons behind the killings, we wind up with something more insane than anything everyone’s favorite fan whipping boy could come up with.
Of course, many genre lovers haven’t had the chance to see the alternative version of the film, otherwise known as “The Producers Cut”. An infamous bootleg among the scary movie faithful, it stands in significant contrast to the eventual edit, including a wholly different ending that would warp the mind of even the most objective Halloween buff. The film does try to bring the material full circle, giving us a pre-Apatow Paul Rudd as a grown-up (and slightly unhinged) Tommy Doyle - you know, the little boy who Laurie Strode was babysitting the night “he” came home - and the last in a long lineage of biological (and locational) relatives for Myers to pick off. There’s a final beat from the brilliant Donald Pleasence as Dr. Sam Loomis, and a nice call back to the horrific house and town where it all started.
But the movie really goes bonkers in its attempts to explain Michael’s mania. Just as Zombie got vilified for turning FBI profiler (and later, amateur psychiatrist) in uncovering the mechanics behind a standard serial murderer’s dementia, Chapelle and Farrands dove directly into the deep end when plowing the path to their terror’s psychosis. For the most recent editions of The Shape, familial abuse, bullying, and blood-drenched fatalistic fantasies turned a sad little boy into a fiend. Later, visions of his dead mother, accented by the occasional white horse, brought the drifting adult Michael his continued rage. But in Halloween 6, Myers was none of these things. Instead, he was a pawn picked out by the Celtic pagans known as the Thorn Cult. Their ambiguous aims, which revolve around power, the protection of same, and the use of small boys as a means of achieving their aims, offers human sacrifice, indirect incest, and 180 degree reevaluation of everything we know about the history in Halloween. And no one cared.
For example, Smith’s Grove is no longer merely the place that housed Michael for all those years before his escape. It was Thorn Central. The Myers home was not only the scene of a horrific crime, but it becomes a central touchstone for both the coven and one of its senior members (who’s always scouting for a new ‘vessel’ to transform). Instead of a well-meaning man of science, Dr. Loomis comes across as a patsy, a blind and narrow-minded shrink who couldn’t see that the basement of the Sanatorium was being used for heretical ancient sacraments. And even worse, Michael himself is no longer the personification of pure evil, the brutish unstoppable fiend who finds purpose in killing. Instead, he is a supernatural sieve, brainwashed (so to speak) to do the cult’s bidding based on the use of runes and the magical manipulation of their various purposes. Toss in a few of the standard slice and dice murders that the slasher film expects, and you’ve got Zombie’s recent updates in an equally baffling nutshell.
So again, why no outcry? Why did fans fail to foam at the mouth when Chapelle and Farrand’s dumped all over the establish Myers mythos to move the series into a wholly weird and slightly wacked out area? After all, Rob Zombie kept things as realistic as possible when it came to death. His Halloween‘s are brutal in their believable, gore-drench fatality. The Curse of Michael Myers has many of its murders handled offscreen, MPAA guidelines demanding such a blood-less approach. And yet everyone dumps on the new films as being “untrue” and “blasphemous” to the original characters and creation. And the invocation of Celtic ritual, pagan symbols, and Rosemary’s Baby like bullspit aren’t? Imagine Jason Voorhees explained away as an extraterrestrial experiment gone awry, or Freddy Krueger as a military project forged to teach children respect. You get the idea.
In fact, one could argue that The Curse of Michael Myers is even worse than Zombie’s efforts when it comes to staying within the series well honed parameters. John Carpenter created the character as a manifestation of our darkest ‘70s fears, a suspense soaked horror that could come from anywhere and was almost impossible to stop. He carried that over into Halloween 2 before abandoning the idea for the thoroughly odd Season of the Witch. Though he didn’t direct the first two sequels, Carpenter proclaimed that he wanted the films to be reflective of the individuals behind the production. In essence, let the artist guide the gruesomeness. But when Part 3 was rejected outright by audiences, Michael was brought back and a whole new foundation was forged. After all, while still human, he was a villain who couldn’t be killed, who was shot, burned, hacked, slashed, entombed, and otherwise chopped up like mince meat. And yet he could always come back, sallow Shatner face intact. Then Part 6 came along and…huh?
It’s no surprise then that, just like Zombie and the recent announcement about Halloween 3D going forward without his participation, everything that The Curse of Michael Myers created was eventually cast aside. Three years later, Halloween H20: 20 Year Later brought things back to the family facets of the original, with Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her star-making turn as Laurie Strode (John Carpenter was also going to direct, but bailed when longtime franchise head Moustapha Akkad refused his asking price). When Halloween II‘s Rick Rosenthal came along to ruin the original’s memory once and for all with his “reality show” take on the material, Zombie’s zoned out update should have been viewed a literal godsend. Argue all you want over its artistic or source material faithfulness, but nothing fudged with the franchise more than Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Even in a pimped out Producer’s Cut, this remains the installment that really turned the terror icon on his head. Why no one complained remains a macabre mystery that will probably never be solved.
—Bill Gibron
8:14 am
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Who Are These ‘Wild Things’ For?
Sure, family films can think -- just as long as their mindset agrees 100% with the attitude of those buying the tickets. Jonze's is journeying deep into the fragile heart of pre-adolescent darkness here, reminding us of how fun and fractured growing up can be.
It will be quite a shock, especially for some parents. Hollywood has homogenized the family film to the point where expectations match artistic aspirations for a competing level of mediocrity. We no longer expect magic, but marketing, no longer believe in the ability of imagination and originality to lift us out of our seat and into a fantasy that only film can manufacture. Instead, it’s all fake finery, CG substituting for any semblance of invention or moviemaking mystery. It’s all an open book, 80 to 90 minutes of sheer time wasting reconfigured into a bunch of anticlimactic pop culture quips and short attention span inspired hyperactivity.
So when something like Where the Wild Things Are comes along, it raises a lot of interesting questions. After all, at its core, it’s a children’s film for those who are no longer young, a work of amazing insight and emotional weight aimed at the schoolyard but much more at home on the psychologist’s couch. It’s been interesting to watch the critical opinions on this long delayed Spike Jonze masterpiece (does that give this writer’s perspective away? Good!). Lines are being drawn, the ‘love it or loathe it’ determination supported by suspect arguments on both sides. Those who hate the handmade homage to the pains of childhood have found it dull, confusing, messy, and lacking author Maurice Sendak’s initial message (whatever that was). Others consider it a classic.
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—Bill Gibron
4:00 pm
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