Let Me In

Some people are tired of vampires.  I am not.

In 2008, Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In (based on the 2004 novel by Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist) offered serious horror film lovers the opportunity to experience a horror film built on texture and tone, rather than shock effects, creating a mood, rather than an assault on the senses.  Its international popularity ensured that there would be a Hollywood remake, with American actors and an American setting.

I am happy to report that Let Me In, directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield), is in many ways better than the original.  It "explains" more than the original film did, unfortunately, but it also trims away some scenes that slowed the Swedish version down.  And the explanations are not tiresome or cheap.  The new film's special effects are superior in every way.  I miss the cat-attack scene--but it's a scene so full of unintentional comic effect (as is true in the original to some extent) that its deletion is understandable.  Sexual ambiguities in the original are tidied up--with clear, no-nonsense borders for American audiences--while maintaining the original's queasy evocations of pedophilia.

The setting is switched to Los Alamos, New Mexico, in wintertime ... to good effect.  The site's history well evokes the idea of "necessary evil," which is central to the story's theme and the perplexing moral anxiety that threads through it.  More unexpected is the switch of the setting to 1983, with flickering images of Ronald Reagan lecturing the American public on "evil" and the 12-year-old protagonist's mother's absorption with televangelists.  In the original, set in the present day (so I thought) the vampire's presence in the small Swedish town evokes the pervasive fear of strangers we have because of the age of terrorism.  But then the theme--that harsh violence is sometimes necessary to resolve existing injustices at the hands of mindless wielders of power--might be too harrowing in post-9/11 America ... even though neither film is expressly or explicitly political.

The performances by child actors Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Moritz are amazingly good--frighteningly good.  Richard Jenkins, great in anything I have ever seen him in, is superb here too, in the role of the vampire's caretaker.  And Elias Koteas tones down his usual manic tics to deliver another great performance as a police investigator looking into what he suspects is a series of satanic ritual slayings.

I intend to rewatch my DVD of the Swedish film sometime between now and Halloween.  Hopefully, more intriguing contrasts will be brought to my attention then.  But the remake is good, very good, and I wouldn't be surprised that I will want that DVD too, once it becomes available--and perhaps give it another look while it is still in theaters.

10 Things About "The Social Network"

 

1. Smooth,  unpronounced special effects in making actor Armie Hammer into twins.
2. All the characters have the same vocabularies, speech patterns, and wit--but then the same could be said of Oscar Wilde's characters.
3. Director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin perform a small miracle in making a talky movie about computer programming and marketing that is interesting to watch, with hardly anything in the way of action, sex, or violence.
4. The camerawork and editing during the crew competition look great in a life-insurance commercial sort of way.
5. Great opening dialogue between Jesse Eisenberg and Rooney Mara, poignantly scripted and well acted ... and nicely mirrored in the film's closing shot, underscoring the protagonist's loneliness with a quasi-Citizen Kane-style coda.
6. The film can be interestingly read as a drama about Jewish identity and intellectualism in the face of persistent American antisemitism.
7. A fine understated performance by John Getz as Sy--be sure to notice it.  No small roles only small ... etc., etc.
8. Trent Reznor's musical score suggests psycho thriller, subtly elevating what is basically dramedy-slash-biopic and giving emphasis to (perhaps?) underlying social critique.
9. This movie is this generation's Less Than Zero, for better or worse.
10. The movie invites smug superior laughter from the audience--so that placing sixth in the Olympics is something we all feel we have done, it would seem, and that we know oh so well the challenges of being a billionaire.  We leave the cineplex feeling smarter and more accomplished than we really are.  We know that "appletini" is funny and appalling, for reasons impossible for us to articulate.
    

Cuba

I had a funny thought today ... well, not funny: sad, I guess.  Sad in the way that my mind still works sometimes, and funny that I sometimes have to remind myself of things like this.

A friend sent me a link to a New York Times opinion piece, which details the sorry state of the American character today.  You probably don't need me to give you the details ... you know:  an assistant state attorney general who cyber-bullies the openly gay student body president at the university he once attended, otherwise intelligent gay young men who kill themselves in large part because some dick doesn't like the kind of sex they're having, the extension of U.S. military bombings in countries (Pakistan, for instance) we are not at war with, media hogs who scream "class warfare" when working-class people complain about being drained dry by faceless corporate financial institutions, the mindless and incessant rallying over values which are, in effect, just prejudices and issues which are, in effect, just hurt feelings.

In response I said, wittily, "Kind of makes me wish I lived in a socialist republic.  Cuba, anyone?"  Then immediately I thought about what I had said and wondered to myself whether I could indeed live in a country like Cuba, ... given its history of human rights abuses, particularly the campaign against gay men during the 1960s, so stirringly depicted in Nestor Almendros' 1984 documentary Bad Conduct and poet Reinaldo Arenas' 1992 autobiography Before Night Falls.

Then I had to laugh (the funny part) ... and asked myself how I manage to live in the United States, given its history of human rights abuses (the sad part).  Slavery, massacres of its original inhabitants, the biggest prison population in the world, extreme interrogation techniques, carpet bombings, and evisceration of its own middle class are hardly things a country can boast of ... not even a god-fearing yet tolerant democracy with a laissez-faire free market.

And in the '60s, while Castro's henchmen were rounding up gay men into concentration camps, the state and local police in the USA were still raiding gay bars and shaking the patrons down for no-contest fines, a state of affairs that eventually erupted in the Stonewall Riots.  In the 1960s, the American Psychological Association still categorized gays and lesbians as mentally ill, subjecting them to apomorphine aversion therapy to "cure" the disease.  Last month, Castro apologized for his contribution to the persecution of sexual minorities.  Last year, Fort Worth and Atlanta police raided more gay bars, beating some of the patrons severely.

The blessings of liberty, folks.

(Photos:  slave with whip scars, a medicine man after the Wounded Knee massacre, 2009 police raid on a gay bar in Atlanta, lynched black man, the Stonewall Riots, child killed by poison gas near a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, lynched black man, incarcerated Japanese-Americans during World War II, and Abu Ghraib.)

25 Reasons I Love Old Tarzan Movies

1. loin cloths (especially those in the pre-Code Tarzan and his Mate)
2. the Tarzan yell 
3. wrestling
4. near naked natives
5. hungry crocodiles crawling into the murky river 
6. the creepy, smoky juju cave in Tarzan Escapes (minus, alas, the lost footage of giant human-bat creatures, who devour the majority of Tarzan's party--a scene studio chief Louis B. Mayer deemed too gruesome for exhibition)
7. the Ganelonis' use of crisscrossed trees to rip poor captives into halves
8. elephant stampedes
9. quicksand 
10. enough steamy sex dream imagery to keep a whole company of Freudian psychoanalysts at work for the next 20 years
11. natives falling off the Mutia Escarpment 
12. giant spider webs
13. vine-swinging
14. the sounds of the jungle at night 
15. the surrealism of out-of-scale rear-screen projections
16. roaring waterfalls 
17. Johnny Weissmuller's unruly hair
18. underwater canoodling 
19. "A Cannibal Carnival" (music score by Sol Levy)
20. bans on firearms
21. animal rights
22. Cheeta
23. the tree house, with plumbing, elevator, and ceiling fans 
24. the elephants' burial ground
25. cute baby lion cubs that you had better just leave alone

Thoughts on Psycho

Alfred Hitchcock's most iconic (and possibly best) movie, Psycho was released exactly 50 years ago today.  It is arguably the first "slasher" movie--but none of its successors have had anything close to its cultural impact, which is not to deny the merit of some of them.  (Halloween, perhaps the best of the rest, capitalized on the original by casting Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh's daughter, in the lead.)  The Reagan-era sequels could not dim (or touch) the power of Hitchcock's film--largely bolstered by the estimable talent of Anthony Perkins--and the much-reviled 1998 "remake" by Gus Van Sant, which followed the original script almost word for word and the original storyboard almost shot for shot, is much much better (and more instructive in the changes in US culture) than most viewers and reviewers gave it credit for, and, as Patricia Hitchcock said at the time, it was precisely the kind of experiment her father would have attempted (he did in fact make The Man Who Knew Too Much twice).

In the homocentric manner that many straight film fans hate, I would like to make a modest, brief argument for Psycho being a "gay film."  Male homosexuality was not a theme foreign to Hitchcock.  Films like Rope and North by Northwest flirted with the subject in the 1950s, the decade in which such references were most taboo in America; Rope even obsessed over it.  Psycho alludes to some of the overt cold-war, quasi-Freudian stereotypes of the homosexual--an overbearing mother who dominates and frightens her boy, a man who likes to wear dresses and pretend he's a woman, and the "sad young man" conveyed in Anthony Perkins' understated performance.  Also the hard-to-miss fact that the film evades the subject of "romance" (heterosexual or homosexual, while rather bluntly addressing the subject of "sex") puts it outside the mainstream of American movies of the time--even in the horror genre, even among Hitchcock's other work.

The opening scene of John Gavin stripped to the waist in a cheap hotel room is one that, despite its patently heterosexual context, lets the camera indulge in the spectacle of the actor's considerable masculine beauty.  The scene portrays the aftermath of sex--worse, illicit sex, since Gavin's character is still married to somebody else.  Gavin literally embodies the ideal masculinity of the period, square jawed, tall, beefily athletic, an image more famously embodied in the fifties by Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, ironically two closeted gay actors.  This image is brought into stark contrast with (later in the film) the oddly birdlike, quiet, gawky diffidence of Anthony Perkins--a markedly different kind of American male, one seldom seen in the movies of the decade, especially not in a leading role.  Later, Gavin's character is "paired" with his girlfriend's sister (played by Vera Miles), with no real hint of romantic interest on either one's part (Van Sant's film is instructive on this point).  Perkins is often shot by himself, isolated, or surrounded by inanimate objects--stuffed birds, academic paintings on biblical subjects, and the empty immensity of the dark Victorian house he lives in.

Alfred Hitchcock was born in the Victorian era, two years before the stately old queen died.  His life spanned the end of Victorianism and the beginning of the end of postmodernism.  The Stick-Eastlake architecture of the Bates' house is in pointed contrast to the boxy functionality of the seedy post-war "motor-hotel" it looms darkly over.  Victoria's disapproving gloom towers above the image of mobile, transient, promiscuous, gawdy "free love":  that this was the established stereotype of motels at the time we know because of Nabokov's Lolita five years earlier.  The film is full of contrasts like this--the performance styles of Gavin and Perkins, as mentioned, but also the jarring abstract expressionism of Saul Bass's opening title sequence and the plodding expository monologue delivered by Simon Oakland, closing the movie on a weirdly anticlimactic note.  In fact, the whole movie appears in retrospect to be an experiment in anticlimax.  The protagonist dies 45 minutes into the film.  The young couple who meet (decidedly un-cute) later in the film never kiss, their only bodily contact occurring as they clasp each other while recoiling in horror at their various discoveries of the truth--an allegory of the Western world in the twentieth century?  A title that exploits the American public's fascination with psychoanalysis at the time (in a decade when shock therapy and lobotomy were still "cures" for homosexuality and other forms of "mental illness"), while the character of the psychologist makes his first and only appearance when the film is almost over. 

Psycho ... or The Birds or North by Northwest or Strangers on a Train ... is my very favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie.  (Sorry to be so indefinite--but the man was a genius.)  Its influence is still felt in American Psycho and on The Simpsons, in the bleak sexuality of AMC's Mad Men and in countless shower scenes in countless erotic thrillers.  Between 1963 and 1971, I visited Universal City Studios in Hollywood three times.  The only constant was the facade of the "Psycho house" still perched on the hill that Perkins descends in horror when he sees the blood of his eroto-phobic mother's latest victim.

Wanna Buy Five Copies for My Mother

Down Time

I am depressed.  Mildly depressed.  Depressed in the probing, essayish manner I am accustomed to.  Not "sad," nothing to be sad about.  Not "bleak," or at any rate my worldview at the moment is no bleaker than it is even in the midst of euphoria.  Not even--though I feel my body losing gas, the essence of depression, as I experience it--not even "dread of death"--quite the opposite, in fact, rather a mild apprehension about the many many many classroom lectures still left to prepare, papers still to grade, bills still to pay, meals still to eat, miles still to drive, awkward silences still to clip short out of some sense of obligation to the comfort of others.

I see depression as a natural cycle of the emotions, just as sleep is a natural cycle of the body.  The unrelenting cheerfulness that Hollywood, the pharmaceutical industry, coffee commercials, cruise lines, and some insanely inhumane religions promote is, to my way of thinking, a nightmare.  Animals are not built for perpetual motion, which includes e-motion.  Mammals, in particular, are not built for the constant busyness of bees or the hyped-up lightness of hummingbirds.  Sometimes we just have to sag.  I see my dog sagging as I write this.  Think about all the indolent lions, tigers, hippos, and apes you have seen in nature documentaries.  In fact, the makers of nature films frequently complain about the difficulty of capturing wildlife on film actually doing something.  Pep is just not an important commodity at our end of the biosphere.

For the past several weeks, on vacation, I have been a slug, and now with the fall semester fast approaching I am experiencing a certain self-awareness I call "depression"--the follow-up of hours on hours of restful, restorative sloth, mixed with an agitating consciousness of impending outside obligations.  The self-consciousness of (perhaps even embarrassment over) one's propensity for slackerliness and slovenliness and one's acceptance of a set of life circumstances that are, let's say, usually unstimulating is what ordinary (i.e. nonclinical) depression is.

Reading Tom Hodgkinson's nifty little book How to Be Idle several years ago was a small transformational experience for me.  I started interpreting my life a little differently.  Like teens and other immature adults I used to panic when I felt that my emotions were depressed ("on pause," so to speak).  I feared boredom more than cancer.  I thought I had an obligation to have a stimulating life--the kind of life that was in a constant state of excitement, even turmoil, which is, after all, the soul of drama.  I even wanted--or thought I wanted--to have a "rollercoaster" life.  I thought I should want--though I never really wanted--to be a "mover and shaker."  Though I never would have put the idea in so many words, I must have thought that "war" is preferable to "peace," as well--how interesting is peace?

This is not to say that I live an uneventful life.  I have my fights and triumphs, my turbulent romances, my agonizing losses--consuming perhaps as high a percentage of my overall life as my dog's playing fetch or a lion's stalking and killing an antelope (which is to say not much, as dogs sleep for half their lives--and stare lazily at their masters for another quarter of their lives--and lions are known to sleep, just sleep, for up to 24 hours at a time).  I even found out recently that peasants, the hardest working social class of the Middle Ages, worked no more than 88 days out of a year ... peasants!

The panic over the apprehension that one's life is being "wasted," which nonhuman animals apparently never experience (not even goldfish!), is what, I think, ordinary depression is.   Depression is perhaps a distinctive effect of American-style workaholism--that neurotic "drive" that causes us to take fewer vacations than most other cultures do (cultures which are, by the way, no less productive than ours) and, when we do take them, to plan them expressly to minimize any idleness--or "rest."  This is why so many teachers believe a heap of homework is the secret to education, why so many parents believe continuous "planned activities" are the secret to happiness, why so many business people believe "efficiency" is the secret to success.  Small wonder, then, that, for the past 30 years, America has been Prozac Nation, the cradle of "cosmetic pharmacology."

I am depressed, as I said before.  Don't worry about me.  I'm dealing with it.