All right. Dreamcatcher.

I remembered watching Dreamcatcher on cable in my undergrad days, but there was an odd fuzzy quality to the recollection. I knew it was bad; awful, in fact.. but I could not recall why.

I now understand the reason: I blocked it out, like a traumatic memory or painful physical injury. There are some things the conscious mind isn’t meant to retain experience from.

Dreamcatcherthe book is, according to the resident King-expert of the household, kind of a mediocre King book. Dreamcatcher the movie is a regurgitated blend of bits and pieces from an entire series of preivous King works, whether they be TV shows or films or the written word. Take one pinch of The Green Mile, a dollop of Stand by Me, a shake of Tommyknockers, a dash of The Stand, burn on the stove for an agonizing two hours sixteen minutes, then hit yourself in the face with a bat until you lose consciousness.

But, you ask, what is it *about*? What’s the story? Why do you hate it so much, and how can we seek revenge on an uncaring universe for allowing it?

The movie is ostensibly about a group of four friends from Maine, now living in the Northeast and going about their middle-aged lives. They grew up together and had wacky adventures, like Stand by Me without the talent or the drama, but moved on eventually. Oh yeah, they also have mild superpowers, which are never properly explained, and only crop up as plot devices.

The four men are jerks, and you largely wish they’d die. One works as a therapist and is a telepath, but hates his own life so much he abuses his telepathy to drive one patient to suicide. Whee! Heroic!

Another can find lost objects and uses this ability to try and score one night stands. A third is a teacher who’s too dumb to notice his students cheating so he spies on them with his telepathy to catch a poor kid who slipped up, which, eh, I dunno. It’s more moral than the shrink. Did I mention you’re really supposed to like these guys?

Eventually teacher-dude gets hit by a car after being lured into traffic by a vision of a mentally handicapped guy in his underwear. Seriously. That leads in no particular way to the film cutting to six months later the four of them going to a cabin for a getaway, as they do every year or so. Teacher man is remarkably spry for someone who should just now be getting the last pins pulled out of his spine, if he ever walked again, but we’ll move on. It’s a vacay, let’s not be downers.

At this point you’ll notice the characters dropping a ton of slang terminology to establish that they have their own cliqueish language. This is something that can be established in a book without great difficulty but would take considerable skill to do well on screen. Don’t worry; there’s no such skill. It’s just mind-numbingly annoying.

Eventually weird stuff starts happening. A snowstorm is moving in, one of the four almost kills a hunter, another two have a car accident avoiding a woman sprawled in the road, the forest animals start fleeing, etc. There’s a painful and crass extended sequence involving the near-killed hunter, who is having extremely severe gastrointestinal problems, which are apparently hilarious.

Lo and behold, it’s an alien invasion. Or something. There’s a bright red glowing fungus that sometimes turns into giant worms that rip out of your ass and kill you.

Yeah. You read that correctly. Fungus – worm – assbursters. In case the Alien reference isn’t obvious, when the Evil Military Commandos show up, we’re informed they call the fungus plague ‘The Ripley’.

Which strikes me as odd, since Ripley is the *cure* for Alien infestations, as any fan of the Alien movies could tell you.

Morgan Freeman is utterly wasted here as a crazed mass-murder inclined Man in Black who’s been putting down alien invasions for decades. Yes, decades. It’s so common they have set procedures and everything. The alien invasion model works like this: land your ship somewhere, infect the local animals with red fungus, a vanishingly small number of people hatch worm thingies, and…. somehow… they conquer the world.

Apparently the overwhelming majority of people heal from the fungus within days. It doesn’t control their minds or make them a threat, and it poorly tolerates cold. So on the Pandemic Horror scale, we’re talking somewhere between Mumps and Athlete’s Foot. But it’s a big deal, and Freeman thinks it’s time to kill the entire, mildly-infected town, before someone gets out with it. His Courageous Subordinate disagrees and plots against him to Save the Townsfolk.

So add in a generous portion of Outbreak to the mixture mentioned earlier.

If this isn’t confusing enough, it gets worse. Zip! Flatulent Hunter dies and a worm thingy kills one of the four idiot stars. Bang, zoom, another one of the cast of four is infected by a slug which is working for a Grey alien that turns into a cloud of spores and takes over his mind. Luckily he has an elaborate Mental Library system he can hide inside. The guy who can find things is coerced into finding a way for Infected Teacher Dude to get out of the quarantine zone, so that he can contaminate Boston’s water supply with a plague that many people would find preferable to the flu. Morgan Freeman uses bad CG helicopters to blow up a bad CG alien ship as the alien Greys beg for mercy in childlike voices. Infected Teacher kills the Guy with the Tracking Ability for reasons that aren’t explained, and the only one of the four still standing is the Bad Shrink, who falls into military custody and convinces the Courageous Subordinate to break him out and find their mentally handicapped friend, who has superpowers far beyond theirs and can save the world.

Seriously.

So that’s what they do. Freeman is busted by the slightly less insane regular military, and he breaks out to follow his personal Brutus in a helicopter via a magical tracking device. Subordinate and Bad Shrink retrieve his childhood friend, who it is revealed gave them all superpowers by accident finding a lost girl from his special needs school. His superpowers leaked out, ala The Green Mile. So he’s not just your mentally handicapped Deus Ex Machina, he is by extension Jesus.

Bad Shrink and Subordinate take Mentally Handicapped Jesus to stop the Possessed Teacher from contaminating Boston’s water supply. Morgan Freeman tries to stop them with a helicopter, which Subordinate shoots down using his sidearm. They both die, mercifully. Which leads to a three way confrontation over the completely unsecured Bostonian water supply between the three old friends, only one of which has a legitimate medical excuse for being this dumb.

Then the Earthshattering Truth is revealed. Their friend isn’t Mentally Handicapped Jesus. He’s actually an Alien Starbaby sent here to save mankind from bad alien invasions. Which I guess makes his whole life a lie, or an act, and allows me in non-PC terms to call him:

Retard Alien Jesus.

Retard Alien Jesus saves the day. Roll credits. Eat a gun.

I hate Dreamcatcher.

Next Week: Secret Window, which doesn’t suck
Last Week: Hearts in Atlantis

More below, etc.

So, Hearts in Atlantis. What to say, what to say.

First, the title is a bit odd, since the story this movie is based on isn’t “Hearts in Atlantis” but a different story from the volume named for that tale, in this case, “The Low Men in Yellow Coats”. My roommate likes it because it ties very indirectly perhaps into The Dark Tower cycle.

Hmm. This is an unusual movie, I have to say. It feels more like a book than any other film I’ve ever seen… something about the way it flows, stretches out in connected vignettes or something.

The movie opens with a middle-aged photographer, Robert Garfield, receiving a letter explaining that his old friend has died and containing a pitcher’s mitt. Garfield goes to the funeral where he learns that another old friend he had been eager to see there also perished some time before, and that starts a flashback to our main tale..

Inside the flashback, Hearts in Atlantis concerns a young Bobby who lives with his fashion-plate mother in 1950s America somewhere in the northeast; most likely Maine, but I forget. In his spare time he longs for a bike and hangs out with his best friends, Sully and Carol, who we’ve already learned eventually drift out of his life and, of course, die. Bobby’s own life is somewhat derailed from its previous course as a new boarder moves in to the apartment above his own, a mysterious old man named Ted Brautigan, apparently on the run from someone or something.

No points for guessing who Hopkins plays.

Bobby builds a friendship with Brautigan, who hires him to watch for pursuers in the neighborhood, under the guise of having the paper read to him each day. Brautigan seems harmless enough, though he does display odd flashes of knowledge he shouldn’t have, and occasionally goes into what one might call a trance or seizure, seeming to see things at distance.

As the summer goes on, Bobby and his friends deal with neighborhood bullies, a budding relationship with Carol, and his mother’s absenteeism and sporadic neglect. Brautigan helps them out with a few of these issues and some life lessons, and all goes fairly smoothly, until his pursuers show up.

I won’t go on from there, to avoid plot spoilers. I will admit to loving how the men chasing him are depicted and described here; shadowy figures that feel out pain and grief, who can only be kept off your trail if you clear your mind of darkness and focus on your happiest moments. A sort of psychic bloodhound that smells pain instead of blood. Fascinating.

Added bonus for King movie fans, the man who plays the adult Bobby, David Morse, was also Brutus the prison guard in The Green Mile.

Overall, Hearts in Atlantis is a fairly easy recommendation. It won’t change anyone’s life, but it’s pretty well put together, and works for an evening’s entertainment.

Not like next week’s Dreamcatcher at all. No sir.

Last Week: The Green Mile
Next Week: Dreamcatcher

So, Frank Darabont hit bigtime success with his version of The Shawshank Redemption. Naturally a few years later, for his second stab at being director, he went back to the King-Prison-Story well to do The Green Mile.

Ok, so it’s not so ‘naturally’. Most directors don’t do back to back King films, as we’ve seen. But Darabont and King are apparently good friends; Darabont even did one of King’s ‘Dollar Baby’ independent movies; there’s a connection there.

And in any event, it paid off again, if less grandly; The Green Mile was generally well-received.

So, what’s it all about? The Green Mile is a period piece, concerning the summer of 1935 in some Deep South state (apparently the movie hints that it’s Louisiana, but it’s not explicitly named). Our main character, now an old man in a nursing home, recounts his days in 1935 heading up the guards running Death Row, and dealing with a series of men entrusted to their care (only to be killed, by them, later) as well as a horrific bladder infection, a friend’s ill wife, and a new sadistic prison guard, transferred in seemingly just so that he could kill another human being. All that before the strangest inmate he ever stood watch over arrives…

I can’t talk much more about the movie without spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it, I suggest you skip to the end.

Ok. The real story, beyond the day to day stuff, concerns the inmate John Coffey, who arrives that summer slated to die in the electric chair for the murder of two little white girls; Coffey, a gigantic black man, was found with the two girls dead in his arms, bloody, raped and murdered. So, given that, and this movie being set in The South, he’s very lucky not to have been lynched or torn apart by dogs or something.

Coffey at first seems to be a stereotypical gentle giant; perhaps even borderline retarded. He’s extremely subservient to authority, timid, even childishly afraid of the dark.

It shortly comes out, however, that Coffey has amazing powers; he can heal the sick, and even, in the case of a small mouse at least, revive the recently dead. When found at the scene, so to speak, with the little dead girls, he repeated over and over that he ‘couldn’t take it back’, which everyone thought was an admission of guilt; in fact, he was talking about a limitation on his power, that he can only ‘take back’ injury or death for so long after the event occurs. Coffey was, in fact, merely trying to help, but no longer capable of saving the girls in question.

Cutting straight to the chase, John Coffey is a Jesus figure. In fact, it’s strongly hinted that he is Jesus, returned to Earth after his crucifixion as a black man. (The reference to him ‘falling out of the sky’, in that he had no traceable past, was a bit blunt; far better are the inexplicable scars he carries all over his body, for which Coffey can’t account)

The movie generated some controversy over the apparent ‘Magic Negro’ figure that Coffey represents, but I am personally shocked that there wasn’t any racial backlash over Black Jesus. I mean, Morgan Freeman playing God in a comedy got some people very upset; here is a serious, dramatic Black Jesus portrayal. Considering that the state executes Coffey, it serves as a double insult to your crazy arch-conservative types in America, who are usually in favor of state sanctioned execution (which is particularly odd for Christians; I mean, their savior was unjustly executed, in the religious story anyway. One would hope for some empathy toward prisoners out of that)

I remember watching this on cable and not liking it as much, but for whatever reason, the Sunday we watched it I found it pretty powerful. Yes, Coffey is a bit one-dimensional, but I think it works; he’s merely the vessel for this *thing*, this far greater presence than himself, which occasionally peeks through the human skin it’s wearing as a disguise on Earth. There are occasional flashes of insight, and some almost Old Testament wrath, that speak to the real power behind the throne, so to speak. Does this enhance or detract from the ‘Magic Negro’ criticism? Personally I’m not sure. Coffey’s human agency is diminished, but he arguably doesn’t serve as a subservient character to the white narrator either. If you take that tack, then you’d have to say that Jesus was a ‘Magic Jew’ to the various gospel writers. That might be fair; a lot of Christians seem to take that view of their religion, that it’s all about them, their needs, their forgiveness. Accept Jesus in *your* heart and be saved, right? The social justice stuff can follow later, or so it appears.

So, yeah. I watched a movie about Jesus around Easter, and it was based on Stephen King. That’s pretty religious for an atheist actually. I liked it too, in spite of my burning hatred of Tom Hanks. Go figure.

Next Week: Hearts in Atlantis
Last Week: Apt Pupil

More below the cut.

Ok, so, Apt Pupil. It stars Brad Renfro, who was really popular as a kid actor in the 90s, briefly, and Ian McKellen, who is awesome in almost anything. It was directed by Brian Singer, who… ok, let’s be honest. Singer sucks. But at least he is smart enough to cast McKellen in things, as he later put him in the X-Men movies as Magneto.

(Aside: that was simultaneously great and stupid casting. Great, in that he cast two Royal Shakespeare Company alums as major roles, stupid, in that he got them backward. McKellen would have been better as Xavier, and Stewart as Magneto. Think about that; you know I’m right).

The movie resembles his later works in some respects. Questionable pacing, flashy camera trickery. Distracting use of color. You get the idea.

At least it doesn’t feel cheap, like X-Men 2, where you started to wonder if they’d run out of money halfway through.

Apt Pupil is based on the King novella, obviously, and concerns a young (in the movie, not so young) boy (played by Renfro) who becomes obsessed with the Holocaust after realizing his neighbor is, in fact, a fugitive Nazi death camp administrator. He eventually collects enough evidence to blackmail his neighbor (McKellen) in order to learn his secrets; the kid’s morbid fascination has gotten the better of him, and he wants to hear all about the stuff they won’t tell him in school.

At first, his neighbor is very reluctant to indulge this request. He seems to have genuinely put that life behind him, and is now an old man, friendly but introverted, locked up in his house and not bothering anyone. However, the threat of being turned over to the Israelis for trial and certain execution loosens his tongue, and he begins to teach his young blackmailer about the whole sordid, gruesome mess he had overseen.

There’s a fascinating premise here that is largely overlooked in the film version. Can a person who commits great evil reform, without repenting? Can you simply walk away from a past like that, and go back to being a mild-mannered, civic-minded taxpayer with a neat lawn and tidy house, watching Mr. Magoo cartoons? Or is the evil always there, just below the surface, bottled up and looking for a way out?

In either case, the blackmail and story time gives it an opening, and the elderly German gradually redevelops a taste for violence and cruelty, as his student starts to run into the limits of his own tolerance for human depravity, even by proxy.

Some of the genuine tension in watching a story like this is marveling at a protagonists’ stupidity. Here you have a stupid, fixated kid poking a mass murderer with a stick to see how he’d react and get some spooky bedtime stories. It’s infuriating, but.. he is supposed to be a stupid kid. Still, at times you want to yell at the screen seeing it, like when a character runs from the knife wielding killer UP THE STAIRS in a horror movie.

Instead of, you know, out the front door.

Irritating a mass murderer is like that. The ‘mass’ part there should alert you as to the risk to one’s personal safety.

Well, eventually things get more complicated, and the kid gets blackmailed in turn, and the whole situation goes to hell, as one might expect. (Gee, who’d have thought tangling with the SS could go so badly?). There’s a fairly major change from the original ending, and David Schwimmer makes an appearance playing the same uptight douchey guy he always plays. Hi David!

Overall… feh. It’s ok. There are a few genuinely disturbing scenes, and McKellen is great. But he always is. (See his Richard the III sometime, it’s amazing).

There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.

Next Week: The Green Mile
Last Week: The Night Flier

Still, we got it eventually.

Surprisingly watchable too.

The Night Flier would seem to have a bunch of strikes against it from the start. It’s based on a short story, which means that a lot of padding is necessary to make it into a full length movie. It wasn’t a big movie, and didn’t make much of a splash.. I’d never heard of it until I started to assemble the SWS list from IMDB.

Then there’s the fact that it’s not available new on Amazon, and after that, Netflix kept bumping it back from the top of my queue, which they do sometimes when they don’t want to admit that a movie is out of stock. (Happens a lot with anime discs, but that’s a topic for another time)

It gets worse once you have the actual dvd; it doesn’t look like much in your hand, cheap and silver without the fancier decoration a lot of dvds get; it has some printing on it that looks like the professional version of Lightscribe. Then you put it in your player and the lamest animated dvd menu in years comes up. I’m not kidding when I say I’ve seen dvd menus made in iMovie that blow this away.

So after I hit play here at the old dvd watching lair, I was fully prepared for another Mangler. Instead.. The Night Flier is a pleasant surprise. Moderately interesting, nicely paced, and up until the end, devoid of cheap tricks and sillyness.

The Night Flier admittedly only goes as far as it does thanks to the work of Miguel Ferrer. He carries this movie, which makes sense as he’s far and away the most important character. In the original story, really the only character. Ferrer plays Richard Dees, a sleazy photojournalist working at a sleazy tabloid that, shockingly enough, does a lot of original reporting. He comes into the picture irate that the photo he scored of a dead two-year old toddler was cut from the last edition of the tabloid.

Classy guy.

Dees is offered a new assignment by his editor: to track down an apparent serial killer who’s making his way down the Eastern Seaboard in a single-engine plane, hitting up small private airfields and killing people who work there.

A serial killer who apparently fancies himself a vampire.

As a side note, King has once again hit upon a unique, and yet very real, setting for his story. Invisible to the public, and supported by a fairly massive federal bailout program, America maintains a huge network of private airfields around the country. The money to do so comes from, believe it or not, a tax on every commercial plane ticket sold, of up to 15%. This money goes into a slush fund, some of which is used to build and refurbish these tiny airfields, which are mostly used by the ultra wealthy and their Lear Jets, along with Congresspeople and of course the occasional hobbyist with a small plane.

Your tax dollars at work. Literally!

So there’s an entire shadow transportation infrastructure out there in this country, but very few people know it’s there or take note of its existence. What if a murderer did?

Dees doesn’t think much of this assignment at first and turns it down. He figures that, with the FAA on the trail of a suspicious plane and pilot, including their plane’s ID number, it’s only a matter of time before the killer is caught. His editor disagrees, figuring that Dees is the best man for the job, being a dedicated sleazemonger, good at his craft, and owning a private plane himself. But after Dees’ intransigence he hands the case off to a new hire and that’s that.. until another killing comes up, the pilot again gets away, and Dees’ interest is piqued.

I won’t go any further than that storywise, for those who haven’t read it, because it is quite good and mostly faithful to the original despite the expansion. The junior cub reporter and the tensions at the tabloid rag are inventions but harmless enough. The movie, carried by Ferrer’s acting, is quite good up until a somewhat doofy ending that goes off the rails. Black and white plus fog machine does NOT equal spooky.

Still. Far better than I was expecting, perfectly suitable for a slow night. Recommended.

Next Week: Apt Pupil
Last Week: Dieting made simple with Gypsy curses, it’s Thinner

I’m getting senile.

Misery is one of the better-loved, certainly more critically-appreciated King films. For one thing, Kathy Bates got an Oscar for her portrayal of perky, crazy stalker-fan Annie Wilkes (and I agree she deserves it). Perhaps another reason it’s widely loved is that, since it lacks the supernatural entirely, it can more easily be categorized as a ‘Serious’ movie, one worth considering in award season or giving that last star to in your review. (It’s worth considering that both The Shining and Misery, easily the two best received (by critics) King movies to this point in his oeuvre, have minimal (depending on your perspective, in The Shining) or non-existent supernatural elements)

Well, Misery is indeed a fine film, though not nearly as *big* of a movie as I’d been expecting, going in. It has a fairly tight focus, a small cast, and a surprisingly short run time, just over an hour and a half. It was directed by Rob Reiner, and for the most part he eschews the cheesy melodrama that so many King movies have unfortunately fallen prey to so far.

Misery starts out with a flashback and a bit of exposition as writer Paul Sheldon (James Caan) finishes up a new novel in his Colorado cabin, and ritualistically consumes a single cigarette and a bottle of Dom Perignon. We learn, via the flashback, that Sheldon is a wildly successful author of a long-running series of romance, or romance-like novels about a 19th century woman named Misery Chastain (god, the name alone..) and that he’s tired of it, and wants to do something new. So, with his last book (which will shortly hit the bookstores), he killed off Misery, to make way for his new work. It’s clear from the conversation with his agent that he felt this was creatively unnecessary, but that, as an author, he had to put these books behind him so he could move on.

Now, a cynical or curious individual might ask why he’d bother writing a book he hated, even just one more, rather than move on directly. It’s clear that he’s under no legal obligation to do so, and his agent isn’t pressuring him either; he’s far too successful for that. Nor is he hurting for money. It feels a bit puzzling, until you realize he wrote that book, not for the money, and not for the fans, but for himself; he wanted to be rid of the whole mess, once and for all. From the context, so that no one would bother him about it again.

Unfortunately, Sheldon’s in a bit of a rush to get back to New York, having finished his first post-Misery work, and doesn’t note the bad weather, snowy roads, or general laws of physics, and ends up taking his Mustang off the road at considerable speed on the winding, guardrail free asphalt. Oops. Worse still, he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Fortunately, a crowbar wielding figure pries his car open and carries him to safety like a sack of potatoes, which brings us to..

Annie Wilkes, Extra-Crispy Bucket of Crazy! But not at first. At first, he wakens to find himself in a quaintly appointed guest room at the Wilkes farm, being tended to by Ms. Wilkes. Luckily, Wilkes says that she’s a nurse, and has tended to his wounds, which were quite severe indeed. Both legs, badly broken, one arm badly dislocated. Sheldon’s a mess, and the roads and phones are out. But that’s ok, she’ll take care of him, and keep him well supplied with pain pills too, until the snow clears.

So begins a sort of cat and mouse game, as Sheldon gradually realizes that something’s not quite right with his host, even as she, his self-confessed ‘Number One Fan’, discovers that he’s moved on, both from fans like her and from the character she pathologically loves.

I have to admit I went into this movie with a lot of baggage. I mean, it’s a pop culture phenomenon. It’s been parodied and satirized and quoted to such an extent that, well, how could you not know the basics? It’s just there now, part of the American lexicon, like Jesus and the Beatles and Super Mario.

Still, it all holds up very well. Kathy Bates is a very solid actress and plays this role to the hilt. I wasn’t quite convinced, until a quiet scene on a rainy day, when Annie swings into full Depressive mode and contemplates a murder-suicide with her trusty revolver. Now that’s some fine Crazy Acting indeed.

Caan is fine, and the side-story with the local sheriff and his wife bantering in folksy manner as he investigates the accident.. eh. It’s ok. It’s there as comic relief, and to lighten the mood, I suppose. I personally wonder if it might have been a yet better and more intense movie having stuck entirely in that farmhouse.

There’s not much else to say. It’s almost a 2 person show. No special effects, no monsters, no real stunts, no big fancy plot devices or writing or soliloquy. Just a man and a woman, codependent and crazy in the Colorado snow.

Hmm, where have I heard THAT before?

Kidding aside, it’s a good movie, a good King movie, and a good movie overall. Recommended.

Interesting trivia: Misery was originally intended, according at least to Wikipedia, to be a Bachman book, one of the works released under King’s literary alter-ego. However, a sleuthy, perhaps obsessive fan, uncovered Bachman’s true identity while Misery was being written. I have to wonder how much this little crusade to unmask King might have inspired Misery; according to teh Wikipedia, it definitely played some role in The Dark Half, another book about the perils of authorship by King, which was dedicated to ‘the Late Richard Bachman’.

Which brings us neatly to Week 19′s movie… The Dark Half.

Next Week: Sleepwalkers! Catpires!
Last Week: Graveyard Shift! Rats!

It’s been a difficult process.

To begin with, Avatar is not a movie, or a film. I can’t tell you exactly what Avatar is, but I can tell you what it isn’t: this is not a motion picture in the traditional sense.

I saw Avatar in Imax 3D; it is also being shown in Direct 3D, and in a 2D version. I can’t speak for the superiority of Direct 3D over Imax 3D; I’ve been to both with various films though not Avatar, and the technology works fine in either. The Imax screen is of course very large, but I’ve been to D3D screens that were also pretty cavernous. Whatever you choose, though, you absolutely must see Avatar in 3D, and that gets to the heart of why this is something new. Avatar is not a 2 dimensional experience. This is, truly, the first immersive film experience.

When seeing Avatar with the proper 3D equipment, you don’t just watch the film; you are, thanks to the surround sound and the 3D glasses, presented with the experience of being partway inside the film. Previous attempts at three-dimensionality in movies (that I have experienced) have been a decidedly mixed bag. Monster House had lovely little 3D elements, like a garnish or a thin layer of icing on a cake. They were there, and complimentary, but completely non-essential. Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D felt tired and forced, a somewhat pathetic attempt to update an already enjoyable movie with the 3D gimmick. Coraline was meant for 3D, but it was also meant to insult its audience and test their patience, and the limited extra dimensionality was mostly there to disorient or confuse you, like the rest of the movie.

Avatar is different. Avatar uses the extra dimension with every shot, with every frame and in every scene. You forget that it’s there, that you’re wearing glasses and they’re bombarding you with their technological genius, because after a couple of minutes you realize that it simply works. Before that sinks in, though, if you’re anything like me, you come to the inescapable conclusion that this is an entirely new way of presenting visual entertainment, that it is both The Future and a new and separate art form entirely from the 20th century motion picture.

It’s hard to overstate the implications of this shift. With Avatar, the natural distance one puts between oneself and the spectacle onscreen disappears. Your brain lacks the automatic ability to simply dismiss the events in front of you as fakes, as an obvious fantasy, because the complicated visual cues for the real world, depth and focus and movement on all 3 axes are present. Depth makes things harder to dismiss, as your lizardy hind-brain is working fully in concert with your powers of imagination in a way that traditional film can never hope to achieve. The best way I’ve found to describe it to people is that watching Avatar is like sitting at the edge of an open window or door onto the outside world. You’re in one space, but connected, closely, to another, very different place, and you can be conscious of, and experience, the one without leaving the other.

So everything feels real, or real-er, and for a movie so deeply tied to the surreal, with 12 foot tall aliens on a deeply strange and hostile world, this helps to create an otherwise impossible realism. Being tied to this world, being unable to unconsciously dismiss it, makes it visceral, gives it an impact into your psyche, makes it more moving and emotional and threatening, than it quite frankly deserves.

Because, ahh, here’s the rub. Avatar isn’t that great of a *movie*. Stripped to the elements that fit into 2D, you have a very workmanlike script carried only by some very competent acting. There are layers upon layers of cliche in Avatar, some political commentary that goes over like a lead balloon. On The Daily Show, Sigourney Weaver said that this is the movie Cameron’s been wanting to make since he was 14. It shows, much like The Fifth Element was supposedly dreamed up by its creator while still in high school, and THAT showed. There’s a simplicity here, cardboard cutouts in place of important characters, a simplistic good vs. evil script that fails to live up to adult sensibilities, all of which speaks to a slightly underdeveloped view of the world.

Still, if this is the work of a high school mind, it’s a very broadly read high school mind (backed by a few hundred million dollars of art). Avatar reminded me of almost innumerable works of science fiction, fantasy, movies, games, actual science, a bewildering variety of concepts. Avatar has pieces reminiscent of Cory Doctorow (think Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom), Greg Bear (particularly Blood Music), George R.R. Martin (A Song for Lya), the later novels in the Foundation series, videogames like Final Fantasy VII (particularly the concept of the Na’vi god, Eywa, which resembles the Lifestream), movies like Aliens (perhaps deliberately, perhaps not, as both Cameron and Weaver worked on both that movie and Avatar), and anime series like Eureka 7…. I could go on like that forever, and I keep thinking of more as time goes by. I’ve seen it compared in reviews to Star Wars and Dances with Wolves; I can’t ever remember seeing Dances with Wolves, but with regard to Star Wars, I think it has a very different feel. Star Wars is an Epic storyline, with a handful of larger than life, classic fantasy archetypes battling for the fate of countless billions off-screen; it’s a bit extroverted, focused on fate, acting through memorable characters. With Avatar it’s the inverse, a handful of tiny, fragile (even if 12 foot tall) people defying fate, being crushed by it, cast aside; it focuses on their internal processes, and hence I’d describe it as introverted.

Avatar, and the religion, if one can call it that, of its Na’vi aliens, also draws upon recent scientific work that has discovered an empirical reality behind the old notion of the environment as one living organism; in at least some cases, this can be said to be literally true, such as enormous fungal organisms, both symbiotic and parasitic, found in North American forests.

For example:

(March 25, 2003 ? Ottawa, Ont.) — The world’s biggest fungus, discovered in Oregon’s Blue Mountains in 2001, is challenging traditional notions of what constitutes an individual. The underground fungus–estimated to be between 2000 and 8500 years old–is also deepening our understanding of the ecosystem, with possible implications for the management of Canadian forests, according to a paper by the discoverers (B.A. Ferguson, T.A. Dreisbach, C.G. Parks, G.M. Filip, and C.L. Schmitt) published March 17 on the Web site of the Canadian Journal of Forest Research (http://cjfr.nrc.ca).

The clone of Armillaria ostoyae–the tree-killing fungus that causes Armillaria root disease–covers an area of 9.65 square kilometres, about the size of 6000 hockey rinks or 1600 football fields.

“It’s one organism that began as a microscopic spore and then grew vegetatively, like a plant,” says Dr. Catherine Parks, a research plant pathologist with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service and co-ordinator of the research team. “From a broad scientific view, it challenges what we think of as an individual organism.”

This fungus is perhaps 2400 years old, as large as a small town, unfathomably huge and hidden. The trees it feeds upon could just as easily be viewed as parts of its body, and the entire ecosystem as symbiotes in the process of feeding… it. Is the fungus, which has lived longer than anything else in that forest, really a parasite upon it, or is the forest the food generating organ of the fungus? Now, what if that fungus was aware of the trees that it feeds upon, if only in the same way as an animal is aware of the parts of its own body?

Likewise, there are forests that, to the outward observer, appear to be a diverse range of life, but in fact consist of one biologically identical individual. Certain varieties of Aspen form clones, connected by vast networks of roots, that would appear to be a forest of similar trees to a person walking through them; in fact, depending on how you define ‘tree’, they could be seen as one, giant, living plant. The world’s largest of these is apparently a tree-forest called ‘Pando‘ in Utah:

The clonal colony encompasses 43 hectares (107 acres) and has around 47,000 stems, which continually die and are renewed by its roots. Many of the stems are connected by its root system. The average age of Pando’s trunks (or technically, stems) is 130 years, as deciphered by tree rings. Michael Grant in BioScience said:
…quaking aspen regularly reproduces via a process called suckering. An individual stem can send out lateral roots that, under the right conditions, send up other erect stems; from all above-ground appearances the new stems look just like individual trees. The process is repeated until a whole stand, of what appear to be individual trees, forms. This collection of multiple stems, called ramets, all form one, single, genetic individual, usually termed a clone.

Some species of Redwood/Sequoia also practice varieties of clone growth, of far larger though less numerous individuals.

At any rate, given the existence of these immense superorganisms on Earth, the concept of a truly integrated, single living creature feels eerily plausible; indeed, such a thing may yet exist undiscovered on the planet. Which brings to mind yet another piece of fiction, a short story by James Schmitz called Balanced Ecology (collected here), that posited the existence of a place somewhat like Pandora (the planet of the Na’vi in Avatar) and also asks a difficult question, seen in Avatar, about what role, precisely, humans could play in such a place. Can we exist, coexist, with such entities, or are we by nature destined for conquest over any alternative systems of life?

So Avatar plays with a lot of themes that have crept up, over the years, in a lot of different places. It has a sense of wonder about itself, about the utterly fake world Cameron has created, the beauty and the dankness of it. Pandora isn’t just a pretty place; it’s hot, dangerous, wet, full of bugs (brilliantly buzzing about in 3D to help set the tone). The characters are almost always sweaty and bedraggled, save the researchers in their air conditioned base, or the bureaucrats who oversee them. But it’s beautiful, and seen as beautiful by the people inhabiting it, and by the audience with one foot in the doorway as well.

Avatar also has a refreshing emotional honesty. Let’s get it right up front: yes, this movie is about the European conquest of North America. Yes, it is also, in a hamfisted, shallow, and ultimately inaccurate way, about the recent (and ongoing) Iraq War. It is as brilliant and honest in dealing with the former as it is glib and unobservant in dealing with the latter. (The two events, contra Cameron, are not terribly similar. The conquest of Native America was largely a conscious, well-considered, coldly murderous genocide, while the Iraq War was an effort by idiots to impose their ideology on the world through trickery, or by distorting reality via force of will. The fact that, from a White Christian European perspective, the North American campaign went so well, and the Iraq war so poorly, reflects this relationship with empircal reality nicely.)

Still, the movie does show, and doesn’t flinch from, the human consequences of the organized sociopathy we call Western Civilization at its worst. Crass, materialistic, dismissive of outside perspectives, violent, homicidal, genocidal, perhaps even ecocidal. Short-sighted, lacking in empathy or compassion, driven to scapegoating and demonizing The Other. The brown, the red, the yellow, the Arab, the Jew, the Indian whoever has whatever it is we want at that moment, money, land, gold, spices, converts. (A point which is made explicit, again somewhat unnecessarily, in the movie).

So you see the cogs in the machine, the bureaucrats, the soldiers, and yes, you see the results of their civilization, the bodies and screaming and blood and terror, fire from the sky, death from above. Beautiful, awful, technological marvels of killing. Death is our gift (to paraphrase Joss Whedon).

That, ultimately, is the thing I took away from Avatar, and its value as a work of art, beyond being an excellent tech demo. The immersion into this world is achieved with technology, and once complete, once it gets past your defenses, with beauty and marvels and tricks of polarized plastic, you’re defenseless to the simple message at the core of the movie, the emotional truths and pain behind the last thousand years of Western history. We are a conquering people, and in between conquests, we try, very hard, to forget the people we put into their graves so that we could take their stuff, plant our flags, and spread our religions. We try, very, very hard to forget.

Avatar tries to make us remember, and in that it finds true value. That Cameron created a whole new way to tell stories in the mass market, something part theme park ride, part theatre, part movie, is wonderful, but it’s the delivery system for a painful historical lesson, the spoonful of sugar or the gelatin capsule. I don’t think Americans are ready to digest this, and I think they’ll dismiss it, or forget it. But it was good of Cameron to say it anyway.

I found myself somewhat depressed, over the weekend, in a foul mood, working through all this. I was turned off of my computer games, feeling too much entirely empathy for the virtual people huddled in the face of my virtual armies. They don’t feel pain, they don’t cry out for mercy, but somehow putting them to the sword wasn’t fun anymore, at least for a while. I was cranky, distracted, had trouble focusing on tasks, easily frustrated… the kind of emotional fallout that’s rare for me, from entertainment.

With some distance, time, perhaps, I’m forgetting a little too. I’m back to my games of conquest, to finding the quickest and most expeditious way to put enemy cities under my boot, plotting vengeance and death against people who never existed. It surely doesn’t matter, in a sense; they’re not real, if I load the last save they exist again, ready to fight back, again. There’s no actual pain, no permanent death. It’s utterly misplaced empathy.

But maybe even that’s worth something. Thanks, James Cameron, for all of it.

This is only the list of cliches I feel strictly apply; close-calls I let pass to save typing if nothing else.

10: Luddite rule – Explicitly stated in the film, that technology was a net evil and hastened the downfall of the human race. Me, I’d have thought putting psuedo-Nazis in power was your real problem.
15: Hey I Know You! – 7 is a Tough as Nails female warrior, but also an Achingly Beautiful Gothy Swordswoman (she makes a helmet from a skull, damnit).
16: Hey I Know You Too! – The villain of this movie definitely likes to make mutated creatures/weapons, and even likes to make them from dead heroes.
35: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose – 9, 5, and 7 beat The Beast, then 9 carries out its plan by accident and gets 2 killed to boot. Nice.
37: Fake Ending – Happens with the fight with The Beast about 20 minutes in.
39: What Are We Going to Do Tonight, Vinsfeld? – 9 becomes about saving the world when the big scary enemy (The Beast) is killed only so the REAL enemy (The Machine) can reveal itself.
54: I Don’t Like Gears or Fighting – Giant robots? Check!
78: Pretty Line Syndrome – Explicit in the movie, as there is precisely one tunnel between the Machine’s lair and the home of the… whatever the protagonists are.
85: Dungeon Design 301 – Small item to place in slot to activate puzzle? Check! Switches to pull? Check!
97: Three Females Rule – There is only one female character in this movie, which seems sexist, until you find out that they’re all pieces of a male human’s soul, which just makes it odd.
98: Experience Not Required – Made explicit in the movie, when 5 marvels at how fantastic 9 is at building things, despite being literally hours old and years younger than the rest of them.
100: Science-Magic Equivalence (Citan Rule) – The same scientist who made The Machine made the 9 protagonists using alchemy or some such, which ties into the Machine.. somehow.
121: Child Protection Act (Rydia Rule) – Very, very obvious here, as 3 and 4 escape all harm despite being helpless, mute and annoying. They’re also, by number, some of the oldest characters. Weird.
135: Pinch Hitter Rule – 2, the designated gadget maker, dies, and is replaced by 5, who also makes things. Though 9 quickly surpasses him.
141: Guards! Guards! (or, Lindblum Full Employment Act) – The Machine has an entire fleet of airship sentries but never guards the ONE PATH INTO ITS REALM
143: Falling Rule – Used to a ridiculous extreme. No fall ever harms any of the protagonists. Their small size and light weight might help with this, but it’s still annoying.
155: Evil May Live Forever, But It Doesn’t Age Well – The Machine defeated all of mankind, including the man who made the 9 protagonists and the MacGuffin. Yet miniature rag dolls beat it.
163: All The Time In The World (Rinoa Rule) – The Machine never finishes anyone off until 9 is there to witness it.
166 and 167: Key Item Rule/Law of Inverse Practicality – 9 starts life with the MacGuffin he needs to save the world (from himself).
168: Way to go Serge – 9 activates The Machine and thus costs the lives of OVER HALF the entire known sentient population of the world.
176: Evil Will Always Triumph Because Good is Dumb – The heroes just keep asking for it, pushing buttons, activating monsters, splitting up, etc.
180: Pyrrhic Victory – Written all over this movie.
192: Know Your Audience (Vyse Rule) – 7 is the only female. Good thing she falls for 9, huh?

So that’s 24 separate videogame cliches alone in 9. I’d also add the following cliches I came up with on my own:

#25: Hologram in a Bottle – The protagonist will receive an important message from a fallen or captured ally via holography, even if such technology is uncommon , anachronistic, or completely out of place.
#26: Twins – Adorable youngsters go better as a matched set.
#27: The World Begins and Ends with You: Even if an ally was clearly capable of saving the world on their own (7 beats The Beast easily), they will be unable to do so until you arrive to spectate.
#28: Fascist Aesthetic – Villainous governments will tend toward fascism more for its aesthetics than values. Shiny black boots and goosestepping iconography ahoy, conservative values not so much.
#29: Sanctuary, Sanctuary! – The good guys will hide in a church, which is usually long abandoned and yet generally well preserved for use as a shelter. No one evil ever thinks to look there.
#30: Boned – Even if it’s completely unnecessary, evil technology will utilize bones or corpses, often for things better suited to steel, plastic or wood… because that way you know they’re EVIL.
#31: Matrix Aesthetic – Machine creatures will be jet black, spikey, and have lots of claws and red eyes, even when made largely from innocuous salvage… which makes little sense. Whoa.
#32: Loose Wire – If something is broken, splicing a bit of frayed wire will fix it, nay, vastly improve it. Somehow the original inventor never figured that one out.
#33: Make Way, Grampy – The protagonist will butt heads with a pompous, arrogant old fool who will come around to protagonist’s way of thinking just in time to die heroically.

I could add more, perhaps many more, but I’m tired of even thinking about this thing.

Pity things turned out the way they did.

Sundance is great, and apparently there are only two, one here in Madison and one in California. They have a nice little restaurant (apparently, we have yet to eat there), a cafe, a bar, and a great concessions stand that is more like an indie coffee house than a popcorn and giant-Pepsi vending area. You can order tickets online, in advance, even picking out your seats, which we took advantage of for 9, so you don’t have to show up a half hour early to make sure you can see and sit together. It’s in the Hilldale mall area, which I used to think of as Madison’s version of Carmel, Indiana, namely the ultra yuppie, fake shopping district concept. I’ve since re-evaluated that a bit; there are too many neat stores in this area, not everything is ultra pricey, and there really is a place on the west side of Madison that is just like Carmel, complete with a whole little town-sized outdoor mall full of soulless and overpriced places to spend your excess wealth and wash away your white privilege with mediocre booze.

It’s sad that such a place exists in Madison, though really it’s more like Middleton out there, I suppose. A Cheeseburger in Paradise? Here? Why would anyone ever go there when you have Dotty Dumpling situated downtown, right across the street from a parking garage, which serves utterly fantastic burgers for 7 bucks a piece? It boggles the mind.

I digress though. Sundance is awesome, and we got to the show in plenty of time, picked up our tickets, and got a couple of truly fantastic apple-spice teas for beverages instead of soda. They were like 2 bucks a piece too! I spend four dollars on lousy bottled water when I go to the movies normally.

We got to our seats and there was a group of young teens in the same row who worried me a bit, but they kept it to the occasional whisper during the show, which was ok… and never happens anywhere else. These kids knew that the theater wasn’t just there to entertain them personally, and tried to use their ‘indoor voices’! There was a nifty pre-show thing on the screen where an audience of old timey woodcut people, ala Wondermark, stare back at you and move around in their seats, which is ten times better than the lame trivia and annoying album promotion that seems to be universal in the multiplexes these days. Not one commercial for Mountain Dew, can you believe it?

Honestly, going to Sundance is like being in an alternate reality.

Then the movie started, and the experience went off a cliff.

Don’t get me wrong, the exhibition of the film was fine, the sound and picture were good. Even the kids in the same row were ok. It’s just.. 9 the movie sucks. It sucks so bad.

It’s boring as hell. Visually it’s very pretty, and though you can see flaws in their texture work sometimes, the movie is easily on par with Pixar animation in a technical sense. But there’s no story to speak of, or to be more precise, it’s a story you’ve seen, read, and played, especially played, a hundred times before. 9 is a mishmash of the worst cliches from popular geeky culture, a small, uninteresting plot populated with cardboard cutout characters* going through the motions of a meaningless adventure. There are stupid puzzles, pointless heroics, and no one draws your attention or demonstrates any depth. It lurches from one set-piece to another, one little contained area to the next, and feels, overwhelmingly, palpably like being stuck watching someone else, someone else who isn’t that bright I might add, playing the most mediocre videogame you’ve ever seen. Explore, interact with NPC (non-player character), find out a bit of story, fight scene, move on. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I kept thinking of videogames while I sat through this little piece of purgatory, videogames that I had played, as a child, a young adult, up to the present day, that had done this story, or pieces of it, and done it better, with the added advantage that I could interact with the game and hence felt *involved*. There are recognizable elements of adventure games like Myst, story elements from Mega Man X and Final Fantasy, even a more than telling little piece of Dragonball iconography. The whole thing has been DONE, and feels tired. By the time they tack on an anticlimactic, unsatisfying open-ending (god, please, no sequels), I was more than ready to go, and longing to be back home watching the last bit of Frost/Nixon on DVD.

9 is an awful movie. But at least I got to see the trailer for the new Michael Moore film. Looks pretty sweet.

*This movie breaks bold new ground in the lack of characterization for a movie. It has the first half-dimensional characters I’ve ever seen (a completely one dimensional character split into two people, thus watering them/it down even further.. a character with absolutely no speaking lines, I might add). It even has a 0-dimensional character, someone who is defined as having one special trait that it is then revealed everybody has, rendering them completely superfluous. Meaningless. A dramatic empty set.

After the underwhelming Carrie last week, I was looking forward to a palate-cleanser, something I knew I was going to enjoy, and fortunately history conspired to bring us The Shining. (If we had been watching TV stuff as well we would have had to dig up a copy of the old Salem’s Lot TV movie)

First though, a quick word about the various releases of this movie. The DVD I rented from Netflix was the standard edition, so imagine by surprise when I put it in the drive and got a full frame version on my monitor. I thought that Netflix only gave you the real version of movies, the widescreen, at least by default, but when I looked at the site it listed it as Full. Confusing me further, the disc itself said it was Widescreen format.

Upon some digging with the Google I figured out what was going on. When Kubrick shot The Shining, he shot it full-screen (technically 1:37:1, aka Academy Standard) and intended to crop it for various theatrical releases. When they put out the first edition of the DVD a few years ago, they just slapped this full-screen version onto the disc, slightly cutting it to make the movie 1:33:1, aka regular TV resolution. That way, they could make one disc for both full-screen and widescreen viewers, I guess. A later DVD version not carried by Netflix was recut and remastered to widescreen dimensions… though the wrong widescreen dimension, as it happens. The Shining was supposedly intended for 1.85:1, and it was cut to 1.78:1 in the special edition DVD, to precisely match modern widescreen tvs. So, with the original DVD, you’re losing a tiny bit on the sides (though getting a ton of stuff never intended to be in the shot at the top and bottom), and with the modern remaster, you’re apparently also losing a tiny bit on the left and right edges, along with the extraneous stuff at the top and bottom of the frame that Kubrick never intended to be seen in theatres.

So, on the whole, you get the bulk of the movie either way, plus a lot of extra stuff intended to be outside the shots in the fullscreen edition. (Which you can really see in the intro sequence, as the helicopter shooting the Torrance family car on its way to the hotel casts a visible shadow at the bottom of the frame, and a less visible blur from its rotors at one point when they reach the hotel at the very top of the frame. Ooopsie. Sort of like a boom mike hanging down.)

I figured that, since if anything we were getting a bit *more* movie, especially after I’d seen the helicopter goof, that it was ok to proceed with the show.

With that out of the way, just let me say: The Shining is an amazing film. Tense, deliberate, it gradually ratchets up the tension toward an almost inevitable cataclysm that you know is coming from virtually the very first scene, like a slow-motion train wreck that you can’t help but watch. Nicholson is absolutely amazing, and Jack Torrence’s descent into madness and murder is firmly rooted in his dissatisfaction with his role as the family patriarch and his feelings of personal inadequacy. Duvall does a good job as an incomplete doormat, a woman suffering from years of strain and emotional abuse who has all but fallen into herself, and even the kid, Danny Lloyd (what is with this movie and actors sharing their character’s names?) does a great job, well, being a five year old kid wrapped up in this awful mess. I’ve seen people criticizing the job he did on various web sites, and I don’t get it; the kid was five! Cut some slack, though I’m not sure it’s needed.

The cinematography is amazing as well. Unlike Carrie, where you are bludgeoned over the head with cheap camera tricks, gothy melodramatic lighting, and sets so over the top you’d think it was a Halloween party, The Shining, perhaps because it was based on a real place, has a great sense of location. You feel as if you could actually walk into this movie, and in some ways you can, at least, into the hotel it was based upon (though according to the Wikipedia, the entire movie was shot on a giant soundstage, a fake quasi-copy of the real hotel! Again, amazing). There is also one very famous steadicam sequence involving a staircase (if you’ve watched it, you know which staircase scene I refer to) that, if you watch the whole thing closely, seems like a ballet done between the cameraman, Duvall and Nicholson. I was stunned at how well they pulled it off (though from what I read on some fan sites, it took a *lot* of takes).

The music is sparse but menacing, though I think it might have gone a bit over the top, a couple of times, in a couple of small places. No big deal, and generally speaking it really adds to the mood. In particular I noticed that, in some of the most disturbing scenes, the soundtrack goes quiet, the sound is muffled, so that it is as if you see these things, often Danny’s awful visions, inside your own head. The movie simulates a bad dream impeccably.

By the end, even though I’ve seen it several times and know how it’s all going to end, I was literally on the edge of my seat. That almost *never* happens. The number of movies I watch more than once with any great attention is very, very small; I’m a bit of a junkie for new experiences. This time I was fully involved the whole way… The Shining is simply a masterpiece, and one of the best horror movies ever made.

PS: This is another one of the King movies whose book I haven’t read (I promise I have read many of his novels, so I have some feel for his style), but I think people perhaps make too much of the changes, and from what I’ve read, King’s more optimistic ending wouldn’t work as well. My roommate dislikes that the movie is somewhat less ambiguous on whether there are in fact ghosts at the hotel, as evidenced by the manner in which Jack escapes the dry goods room. I admit, I would have skipped that particular choice. Still, these are nitpicks in a masterpiece.

Next Week: EC Comics on the Big Screen (Almost). It’s Creepshow!
Last Week: Sundays With Stephen starts right here, with Carrie!