Two updates in two days? This is not change you should believe in...

In a mostly "eh" week of comics, Secret Six #3 reminded me why I read monthly superhero comics.

After an acceptable but not overwhelming issue, our six supervillains, hired by a mysterious benefactor to retrieve former metahuman Tarantula and a Macguffin, find out what the Macguffin is. And suddenly, an issue filled with (seeming) non-sequiturs from supervillains on all the evil stuff they've done makes sense and a bunch of discussions/thoughts on redemption throughout the series take on extra narrative weight.  Simone mixes the mystical and noir elements of the DCU to great effect, 

If it wasn't rather heavy on DCU-continuity, I'd say it would be the kind of comic Eve Tushnet would love to read and discuss. It might still be, at that.

[SPOILER]

In a well-handled scene, tears trailing down her face, Tarantula reveals that the card she took was created by Neron, the DCU's version of the devil. Written on it in Aramaic is "get out of hell free."

It's adding a religious spin to noir. Instead of everyone wanting one big score or wealth or safety, everyone wants heaven. And they don't care what they have to do to get it.

"Some sort of madness... I just don't understand"

Who Can Kill a Child? a.k.a. Island of the Damned (d. Narisco Ibanez Serrador, starring Lewis Fiander and Pruella Ransome, Spain, 1978)

Just finished this and I can't really do a full review of this, if only because I don't know how to do justice to this without giving too much away or ruining it. This is a horror film, but not a gory film. There is a little bit of blood, but you're not going to see any eyeballs gouged out or guts munched. This is more in the mode of The Shining, where careful cinematography, meticulate design, and natural performances build a slowly unsettling world. 

If you need a plot description, Tom and Evelyn (Lewis Fiander and Pruella Ransome, a couple of English actors whose other screen credits are mostly BBC series appearances) are a happily married couple on vacation in Spain, enjoying a last vacation away from the kids before the heavily-pregnant Evelyn gives birth. They're not too happy with the crowded, noisy city of Benavis. I wouldn't blame them, because dead, mutilated bodies are washing up on the beach the day they arrive.

So they head over to Almanzora, where Tom spent some time twelve years ago. When they arrive, they find the town pretty much deserted except for some children. In fact, if it wasn't for the children, they might think that everyone had disappeared...

If this sounds a little cliche, don't worry. Serrador does an excellent job of building tension without resorting to those cheap "cat jumps out of a room" kind of tricks. Once again, like "The Shining", this is a film that plays with silence and a pared-down soundtrack, that carefully frames shots for subtle effect. Most important, this is a movie where every single death registers (and I do mean EVERY SINGLE DEATH), saddens and horrifies. This has to be one of the few horror movies I know that starts with a news montage about (at the time) contemporary political atrocities without seeming pretentious or cheap.

Fiander and Ransome also deserve from credit. They play a married couple that argues and has problems without making them bickering or forgetting their love for each other. And when they make poor or selfish choices in the film, it's not because of stupidity or script contrivance, but because of everyday human emotion.

In fact, the only problem I had with the film is that the last forty minutes lack the sense of originality the first seventy had. There are still some great scenes (the first time the titular question is answered, for instance) and every moment is competently done and believable, but it moves into territory both Romero and Hitchcock have already explored. And the very last few minutes are guilty of dialogue that is a little too on-the-nose... 

But please, please, please add this to your Netflix queue. The only place I've ever seen this reviewed was on Fangoria, and it does not deserve that level of obscurity. It's not even gory! Just terrifying on a moral and spiritual level.

...But it has zombies in it. How can I not like zombies?

I read Marvel Zombies by Robert Kirkman and Sean Phillips in Borders today and was glad I didn't pick it up either in singles, hardcover or trade. It was competently executed, with one or two good gags (emo zombie Spider-man and "Hulk is the Hungriest Man there is") and a few good disturbing notes (the idea of the zombie Avengers faking rescues to lure out survivors, for example).

But it neither teased out any societal analysis as the best zombie media does (Romero films, Walking Dead, World War Z) or went for all out tastelessness that the most enjoyable gut munchers do (almost any Italian zombie film not made by Fulci, Dead Alive).  The only thing approaching subtext was the title: this was a book for Marvel obsessive or zombie obsessives. Unfortunately, I count myself as a zombie obsessive (I've watched Hell of the Living Dead, people. That is not something a sane person undertakes lightly) and I found it as unsatisfying as the morsels of human flesh that fall out of the zombies' own rotten gullets.

Pondering a couple post topics soon:  A Defense of Lucio Fulci, a write-up of Act of Violence (with Robert Ryan and Van Heflin) and Mystery Street (with Ricardo Montalban and Charles Laughton's beard), or maybe something about Who Can Kill A Child? (if Netflix comes through).

"Woyzeck" (Vesturport Theatre) at Brooklyn Academy of Music

If I made it to heaven, I'd have to help out with the thunder. "Woyzeck" by Georg Buchner

So I wanted to visit friends in NYC and I decided to schedule it around the production of "Woyzeck" playing for one weekend at the BAM, because Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (not the comic book writer but the violinist behind the Dirty Three and a member of the Bad Seeds) had written original music for it.  I'd already seen Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform live within the past month, but I figured that this music was unlikely to be recorded any time soon and wanted to see how it would fit into the context of the play. 

First, a caveat: its been a while since I've read "Woyzeck", so I remember the broad plot and the fact that Buchner never finished the play before he died (or at least, there is no "finished" version of the play) and so different productions will rearrange the scenes in different orders.

For those of you unfamiliar with the play, Woyzeck is a poor soldier who supports his lover Marie by participating in strange medical experiments. Marie has an affair with the Drum Major in his unit and Woyzeck kills her over it.

The story sounds like it should be the basis for a Nick Cave song anyhow (like "Where the Wild Roses Grow"), so I figured it would be a good fit. And it was. The four or so songs that showed up in the piece were a brilliant mix of absurdity and emotion, whether an off-key Tin Pan Alley love song Woyzeck warbled for Marie (underlining his instability and insecurity) or the swaggering blues rock of the Drum Major's entrance (that has him bragging about being six foot seven in bare feet!), the songs made sense of a play that sits on the razor's edge between Dreiser and Beckett. And the cast had some good (or at least appropriate to the character and song) voices. The Drum Major (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) occasionally ventured into the territory of bad heavy metal vocalists, but otherwise could have been a (non-annoying) Broadway singer.

Unfortunately, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' music really only shows up in the first half.  And the show only clicks when everyone is singing. Because (oh god!) this play was directed by a pretentious European director with A (cough*bullshit*cough) CONCEPT.  There is nothing more dangerous in the world of theatre than a director with a bit of acclaim and A (cough*bullshit*cough) CONCEPT.

See, Gisli Orn Gardarsson decided to set his production of "Woyzeck" at a water factory that looks like a cross between playground equipment and the Nostromo in Alien. Oh, and there are also water tanks that the actors will swim in, like people would if they were making drinking water.  And a trapeze and a climbing rope, just like in all water factories. The design is well-executed, but I never felt that this set, even in the abstract, was a place where people worked. It was a cool-looking place that the actors could do circus tricks on.

You know, I am breaking my "No Snark" vow, but geez, High Concept directors must be stopped!

Moment of fairness: water is talked about a lot in "Woyzeck". But except for a bit of inconsistently altered dialogue (Herr Gardarsson also "adapted" the script), three vague lines in the director's notes and the water tanks to play in, there wasn't a sense that the water factory itself was that important to the world of the play that Herr Gardarsson conceived.  It could have been any factory or any physical labor site or even the army.  So perhaps someone could still do a water factory "Woyzeck" that would work, but it would at least have to use the concept to inform the actual play.

Unfortunately, there were no performances that suggested even that charitable view. Every character spoke/shout (in English) in the exact same inflection. In all fairness, I'm not sure if it was the fault of acting in the performers' non-native language or a directorial choice, but I will say that when they sang, the performers seemed to use the proper kind of phrasing you would expect from an American pop song. I was sitting in the balcony, so I might have missed some physical subtlety, except the default setting for physicality was clumsy slapstick. Woyzeck (Ingvar E. Sigurdson) pissed on the Doctor's face (Harpa Arnarsdottir), the Captain (Vikingur Kristjansson) tried to rape the Doctor, etc. (In retrospect, a lot of brutality was visited on the Doctor, played by a woman, in a way that is not borne out by the play. It had no place in the play and it added undertones of misogyny where none existed before.) "Woyzeck" is not a comedy, but if it must be, it shouldn't feel like one of those sub-Three Stooges comedies that PRC films cranked out by the dozens in the 1940s.

These are just the major issues that struck me during the play. It is hard to believe that this company performed a critically acclaimed Romeo and Juliet at the RSC and in New York!

The one thing I will give this awful production is that it illuminated a religious side of "Woyzeck".  The frequent references to water, the Captain's bourgeois discussion of morality, Woyzeck's disbelief that sin should leave no mark on Marie's face, and the quote that starts this post seemed increasingly significant in this tonally dissonant piece where finding a director's meaning was like reading a hack detective novel missing half the pages. I thought that "Woyzeck" focused on the dehumanizing ways of the modern world in the manner of Georg Kaiser or Arthur Schniztler. But in my state of alienation, it seemed to represent the dehumanization of the poor in a world where bourgeois conceptions of religion consider morality to rely on money.  Thus the Captain can say Woyzeck is good but not "moral", the Doctor can conduct cruel and manipulative experiments on him, and the Drum Major can take his wife with no consequences. Woyzeck is without friends to help him (Andres is merely a gossip, Marie is his betrayer, the other men watched the Drum Major beat him without helping) and there is no chaplain or priest to offer comfort. As such, he can only commit a brutal murder against the one person less powerful than him. 

I'd need to read the play again to verify if this could be a valid interpretation. But other than Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' compositions, it was the one interesting thing I took from the evening.

And sometimes I feel that life's a movie/ but I don't like the film

So, all this talk of Kenneth Branagh directing Thor (which is an inspired choice for an action picture, but who thought Peter "Dead Alive/Meet the Feebles" Jackson would work out for Lord of the Rings?) has reminded me of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, where he stunt-cast the film to within an inch of its life.

Some of those choices worked out well (Charlton Heston as the Player King!), others barely registered (poor Gerard Depardieu as Reynaldo), and some were incredibly misguided [Billy Crystal as the Gravedigger ("and tell me, what's the deal with the Adam as the first gardener?"), Robin Williams as Osric?]. So in the spirit of William Shakespeare's Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, I have come up with a new game:

KENNETH BRANAGH'S [Blank]

The way you play Kenneth Branagh' s [Blank] is pick a stage play and come up with an ideal cast based on people outside the chosen genre. So if you're casting Antony and Cleopatra, no (primarily) Shakespearean  actors. Other than that, they can be anyone, living or dead, from any era of their career.  Of course, you can play fast and loose with that last part, but still, STUNT CASTING!

As the inaugural edition of Kenneth Branagh's [Blank], I present, 

Kenneth Branagh's Richard III

Richard III - Richard Baseheart played two fascinating psychopaths in the early part of his career for Anthony Mann (Robespierre for Reign of Terror, cop killer Roy Morgan for He Walked by Night) and it would have been great to see him essay one of theatre's most famous psychopaths at that stage in his career. I doubt he would have fallen into the campier vein that so often afflicts Richards.

Edward IV - Sterling Hayden (in his 1950s heyday) might seem an odd choice for a dying King, but in his best roles, Hayden was able to simultaneously embody solidity and fatalism. In Johnny Guitar, as a figure of denial and impotence helpless before Joan Crawford, in The Killing, a careful, reasonable man doomed to fail by human nature and coincidence. And Edward is supposed to be prematurely aged by years of relentless drinking and womanizing anyway. So slap some old age make-up on him and I bet he would have done well as a once-mighty warrior undone by guilt and his own over-indulgence. (P.S. No need to mention the impotence at the heart of Jack D. Ripper in Strangelove, is there?)

George, Duke of Clarence - one of my favorite renditions of Clarence was an incredibly flawed Chicago Off-Loop theatre production where the actor playing Clarence saw him as a weak-willed, burnt-out slacker who always relied on his charm to bail him out. Jeff Bridges is able to portray sons of privilege (Winter Kills, Iron Man) and burnt-out slackers (The Big Lebowski, for starters). Plus, he would add complete a trifecta of York kids who look powerful but all fail as men of strength in one way or another. 

Buckingham - when you've got a cold, chilling Richard, you normally need a Buckingham who is smart, charming with tinges of malice. I've always felt that Buckingham is best as an up-and-comer who thinks he's too smart to suffer any consequences for his actions. Gene Kelly in his prime could always balance cleverness with charm and moments of aching vulnerability, always useful qualities in a con man. At the same time, in films like It's Always Fair Weather and What a Way to Go!, he was able to delve into toxic levels of self-loathing, contempt and egotism that would be a near-match to Richard more private scenes.

Lord Hastings - Another theory on Richard's conspirators: Hastings is someone who's got to be ambitious but too weak to carry out Richard's worst acts. Eric Roberts in Star 80 did a terrifying job of burrowing under the skin of an incredibly unlikeable person who did awful things and making him pitiful without apologizing for him, a difficult task for any actor. Hastings is not as horrific, but there are similar issues of someone capable of doing manipulative acts of evil but still oddly naive.

Catesby - Lee Marvin always held the coiled intensity of a snake waiting to strike, even in old age, and I love the image of Catesby as an older retainer of Gloucester's, one who came up through the ranks in the War of the Roses by his bravery and cruelty. And Marvin always finds a way to own the screen whether he's on screen for five minutes or fifty.

 

Marquis of Dorset and Lord Grey - Relatively minor roles, but after all the time travel to Nineteen Fifty Something and morally conflicted people, I'll go with a game changer and pick James McAvoy and Simon Pegg. With the former, you'd understand why you'd need Richmond to come back (beyond the obvious bloodline issues), while the latter points out Elizabeth's annoying, unpopular family. Also, this Richard III shaping up could use some comedy that wouldn't be wack-a-doo.

Henry, Earl of Richmond - Christian Bale. And yes, he's already been in one Branagh Shakespeare history. But Richmond is a cipher, someone with connections to the throne but removed enough from the original fray to sweep in as a unifier. I don't know what else Bale can do, but he can play a cipher, the mask given human form.

And, since I don't want this to be a three thousand page post, onto the women:

Queen Elizabeth - Nicole Kidman. Because you should be able to see why people are annoyed by this nouveau rich aristo being Queen, while seeing how she could charm Edward into marrying her (no small feat when she was up against a French princess) and noticing the sheer cold steel in her spine that allowed her to hold her squabbling, fractured family together as long as she did. I don't think there's any question that Kidman is good at being alluring (in the psychological sense, not just the obvious aesthetic sense) while also being calculating and manipulative. Elizabeth shouldn't be evil, I should clarify, otherwise there is no point in that long scene with Margaret and the Duchess of York about teaching her to curse her enemies. But Clarence and company need someone who is off-putting, if only so we understand why everyone bickers and turns in on each other as Richard knocks them off one by one.

Margaret - Leslie Easterbrook, if only for Mama Firefly in Devil's Rejects. By this point in tetralogy,  the character has lost whatever claim to nobility (in all senses of the word) and merely possesses an epic hatred for the world. She is only queenly in her grotesquerie. And what are her confrontation scenes except slightly more elevated versions of Easterbrook's interrogation by William Forsythe in Devil's Rejects?

Anne - Anne needs to be both incredibly sexy and deeply conflicted about that. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain her acceptance of Richard on any level. She must be the first one to call herself a fraud if Richard is to succeed. Naomi Watts, in I Heart Huckabees and Mulholland Drive, did an excellent job of being pretty and charming, seeming innocent yet wrapped up in tons of neuroses and self-awareness. Richard has got to persuade her that she is guilty of Prince Edward's death (and it is an amazing feat), but she has to take the first step herself. 

Duchess of York - This is hard because the Duchess of York strikes me as resigned and quietly sad until maybe the very end of the play (where she denies Richard her blessing). I feel like she's got to have some strength (otherwise, how could she survive all her many losses and still try to comfort Elizabeth) but she's not a figure of rage. Can I propose (alternate reality) Jane Fonda? Ignore Monster-in-Law and Georgia Rule and pretend that the brilliant actress from Klute and the like somehow matured keeping that same sense of gravity. Her performance in Klute has to be a masterwork of subtle touches, a mix of resignation types stoic and suicidal, turning a stock character (a prostitute that needs to be protected and rescued) into a living human being with a mess of contradictions relating to issues of control and performance of self.

I'm calling this here because otherwise I'd be writing this post until Kenneth Branagh made Thor. However, I tag Leigh, Helen and Zev to carry on the meme, if they so wish it.

Captain Clegg, or, Night Creatures (1962)

This is a strange film to talk about, if only because it's a Hammer film that only pretends to be a horror film. The US title of Night Creatures , the presence of Peter Cushing and the opening scenes suggests another Hammer period horror piece.  But it seems like an attempt for Hammer to move beyond the horror genre, an attempt that had little success...

We start off in 1776 on Captain Clegg's ship, where his bosun is reading off the punishment of a crewmember (Milton Reid) who apparently raped Captain Clegg's wife, for which crime the man will have his ears sliced off, his tongue cut out and marooned with no food or water on a deserted island. Did I mention we only saw the Captain from behind and in shadow?

Almost immediately we jump to 1792, to the Romney Marshes, where an old geezer (Sydney Bromley) has made the mistake of taking a late night walk. Unfortunately, a bunch of ghostly, skeletal horseman (watched over by a scarecrow with human eyes!) have also decided to go out tonight and frighten the man to death.

The next day, Captain Collier (Patrick Allen) and about a dozen British sailors show up in Romney Marshes to investigate a smuggling ring. They've timed their visit so that the villagers are in church and won't have time to hide their smuggled French alcohol. However, the normally verbose Reverend Dr. Blyss (Peter Cushing) decides to cut his sermon short and gives a signal to certain churchgoers to leave early. It looks like Captain Collier might be up against more than the normal crude smuggling operation. On the other hand, Captain Collier brought along a certain tongueless, ear-less gent with a good memory of old comrade.

As you can imagine from that description above, Captain Clegg is more of a crime thriller with horror touches. If I had to be that annoying high concept movie pitch guy, I'd suggest The Untouchables meets Tombs of the Blind Dead. The story is very loosely based on Dr. Syn by Russell Thorndike, which was also the basis for the 1937 film Dr. Syn and the 1962 Disney tv special (!) The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. The character is also referenced in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels.

I can easily see why Hammer would make this film. It looks like horror, but allows them to move into less heavily exploited territory and explore beyond the normal horror pantheon.

And the movie is quite fun. Cushing does a good job of jumping between the poses of the goodhearted Reverend Blyss and the colder, more pragmatic Captain Clegg, without making it easy for the viewer to decide which one is the "true" man. Allen is also fascinating as an iron-willed naval officer who can be as vicious, if not more so, than his quarry. Oliver Reed shows up as the male ingenue and manages to find a little depth to an under-written character.  The "marsh ghost" costumes are creepy and effective while remaining credible as homemade outfits.

On the other hand, Clegg doesn't really come together. The cat-and-mouse game between Allen and Cushing is well done, but too much of the movie is about the sailors and smugglers sneaking around rural England.  It's pretty easy to guess at Cushing's former identity early on, so there is no mystery. And while Oliver Reed does a good job with what he has, he barely registers as a character for the first half of the film and he doesn't get to do that much afterwards. And the "ghosts" only show up twice for a few minutes each time.

I wouldn't be surprised if horror fans left disappointed and no one else showed up. When Hammer films are discussed in books or websites, Clegg gets left out (even when someone will go so far as to cover Dracula AD 1972!). If anything, it seems like the story would do better now that Pirates of the Carribean has opened the door for pirate/thriller hybrids, although the supernatural elements would need to be seriously ramped up.

Thematically, the movie keeps raising ideas like the way the government regulation is more likely to hurt common people than help or the games people play with identity or the secrets hidden beneath the surface of idyllic rural life and then casting them away to focus on an uninteresting mystery.  I certainly didn't expect a fifteen minute speech on Milton Friedman or John Keegan, but there were certainly relationships and plot points which would have delved deeper and that got rushed through or ignored.

Jesus was no zombie, God was no necromancer

Okay, I have no idea if anyone finds my MBotF liveblogging interesting, but this post is just using that as a starting point. So bear with me and I'll be in broader territory soon enough...

Right now in Toll the Hounds, there is a lot of to do over a newly created God called the Redeemer. A few books back, a human soldier basically took all the sins of one of the undead demihuman races upon himself, died in the process and was reborn as a good.

However, since this is a fantasy novel, filled with cruel, distant, vengeful, whimsical or semi-retired gods, some of the characters are wondering what sort of god takes all his followers' burdens upon himself without demanding anything of them.

This is a weird development, since the universe these characters exist in is unrelentingly pagan in outlook. A few people get a pleasant afterlife, but a lot of them (including some of our heroes) end up as ghosts, or chained to an endless rolling wagon pulled by the souls of the dead or utterly annihilated from existence (even in a metaphysical sense). Just like the tragedy of King Lear is worsened by the fact that, in pagan England, Lear and Cordelia won't even face a better fate in the afterlife, so much of the death and destruction in the Malazan Book of the Fallen becomes more powerful. 

This is also a strange step because when I think of sword and sorcery or epic fantasy, there is either no religion or a bunch of pagan religions that might superficially resemble modern day faiths (but only superficially).

I wonder how much of this is down to the influence of Tolkien. After all, despite his deeply held faith, he refused to inject Christianity into Lord of the Rings (or at least overtly). Contrast this to C.S. Lewis, his contemporary and sometimes friend, who has Santa Claus show up in Narnia to accompany Thundercats Jesus. [I'm sorry, I think Lewis is a enjoyable writer and I have fond memories of the Narnia Chronicles, but only a child would find Aslan a subtle stand-in for Jesus].

I'm also sure that some of this is fallout from the 80s, when anything that smacked of darkness and magic (heavy metal, Dungeons and Dragons) was accused of satanism. I doubt that it was only religious parents that felt this way (even some agnostic or mildly religious families probably thought Ozzy Osbourne and Gary Gygax were encouraging suicide or the occult) but you merely have to surf the RPG blogosphere for five minutes to hear stories about church ladies taking Keep on the Shadowfell away from high schoolers. And as for metal (or punk or anything that wasn't "She Loves You") ...just watch a couple Behind the Music segments on Ozzy or Judas Priest, or listen to Jello Biafra's monologues on the PMRC.

I think it's pretty apparent that people suffered scorn from other sources than adults (parents, church leaders, teachers) for their hobbies, but bullies or girlfriends or peers can't actively keep you from playing a game/reading/listening to music. I also think that this is why so many people involved in speculative fiction or RPGs or alternative/metal/punk are dismissive of religion in general. Their development as adults and fights for independence are tied up in what they see as a struggle against religion. There's nothing like over-bearing, un-Christianlike Christians for creating overbearing, contemptous atheists/agnostics (and vice versa, I'm sure). 

And frankly, I think it has hurt both sides, poisoning discussion, turning bright and creative people against their faiths, and depriving lonely and misunderstood people of a place that is supposed to be a shelter for the lonely and misunderstood. 

I know I didn't feel the sting of this so much, personally. I didn't get into RPGs until college and my parents were fine with me checking out whatever books I wanted from the adult section at the age of 10 (including Stranger in a Strange Land). I have had conversations about the music I listen to and (weirdly enough) the Simpsons, but they've usually worked out well. *

It probably also helped that I was Catholic and our church (i.e. St. Francis of Assisi in NC) was not obsessed with the Bible as a literal Word of God.  I get the impression that all the Evangelical churches that obsess about the Earth being created in six days forget the fact that the Bible is full of metaphors, allegories and parables. 

More later, probably...

*I still remember getting Nas' Hip Hop is Dead and Sweeney Todd: The Original Cast Recording when I was home for Christmas a year ago. I was listening to Nas in my old bedrom when my mother came in to ask me something. She immediately said something along the lines of, "I can't believe you like that". I put in Sweeney Todd and she was fine with that.  Once again, Nas album about rap moving beyond drugs, violence and acquisitiveness = no. Musical about cannibalism, murder, and rape that suggests the world as a charnel house untouched by God = yes. The medium is the message, I guess.