The Two Pagodas

RED CLIFF (PARTS ONE AND TWO)

In his first film since 2003's Paycheck, and his first Chinese film since 1992's Hard Boiled, John Woo recounts, in grand, old silver-screen style, an episode from ancient Chinese history, relatively unknown in the West (if I'm any barometer) but as celebrated in the Far East as Washington's winter at Valley Forge or Robin Hood's struggles against Prince John.

In the early third century, the great Han Dynasty is in decline, and the tyrannical prime minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) effectively rules in the emperor's name. In southern China, numerous warlords have risen up to resist him, including Liu Bei (You Yong), who struggles to shelter refugees fleeing from Cao Cao's forces. Hope for resistance lies in Sun Quan (Chang Chen), the most powerful warlord but inexperienced, who hasn't yet openly breached with Cao Cao. To bring Sun Quan into alliance against Cao Cao, Liu Bei sends his brilliant strategist and diplomat Zhuge Liang (Kaneshiro Takeshi) to Sun Quan's court; he succeeds, and Zhuge Liang joins Sun Quan's great lieutenant, Viceroy Zhou Yu (Tony Leung), at his encampment at Red Cliff, strategically guarding the Yangtze River, to defend the south against Cao Cao's vast advancing army and navy. Complicating matters is the fact that Cao Cao harbors a love for Zhou Yu's beautiful wife, Xiao Qiao (Lin Chi-ling), and may be using the war to obtain her at last. (Hope you're paying attention, because this will be on the final. Seriously, though, it makes a lot more sense while you're watching it.)

All this just sets the stage for the main body of the story, Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang's defence of Red Cliff against Cao Cao's approaching army and his navy sailing down the Yangtze. Amidst this, there is a multitude of strategies, counter-strategies, personality clashes, and setbacks over the film's two and a half hours. (The version of Red Cliff released in Asia was released in two installments totalling four hours and forty minutes.) Basing his account on the third-century Records of the Three Kingdoms, Woo has created an epic historical romance with sweeping scope, intense action, and enough room left over for tender moments shared by Zhou Yu and Xiao Qiao, the growing respect and friendship between the brawn of Zhou Yu and the brains of Zhuge Liang, and even a little humor. The first comparison that came to mind watching this was Peter Jackon's The Lord of the Rings; both have huge scope but keep the focus on the individuals bringing all of it about, while doing so in a grand, old-fashioned, ripping-yarn way. Zhou Yu is Aragorn, the noble-hearted hero fighting for country and love; Zhuge Liang is a younger, less magical Gandalf, the strategic mastermind uniting all the forces of good; Sun Quan's sister Sun Shangxiang (Zhao Wei) is Éowyn, the man-hearted princess who insists on joining the fight. Basically, if you liked The Lord of the Rings and aren't adverse to reading subtitles or learning a little about Chinese history along the way, Red Cliff should be a good time.

(The story is told in media res, covering only a few months in late A.D. 208 and early 209, so you don't really find out what happens after the Battle of Red Cliff. Zhou Yu died of natural causes about a year after the battle; unfortunately, the Latin-alphabet Wikipedias don't say anything about Xiao Qiao's fate. Cao Cao returned to the north, where he continued to rule until his death in 220; his son Cao Pi succeeded to his position, forced the last Han emperor to abdicate, and became the first emperor of the Wei Dynasty in northern China. Liu Bei, as a distant relative of the deposed Han, then declared himself emperor as well, founding the Shu Dynasty in southwestern China's Sichuan Basin; he died in 223. Zhuge Liang continued to serve Liu Bei and his new dynasty as chancellor, waging several wars against Cao Cao and his successors before dying in 234. After wavering between allying with and fighting Cao Cao and the Wei, in 229 Sun Quan declared himself emperor of the Wu Dynasty—the third of the "three kingdoms"—in most of southern China; he ruled, first as warlord and then as emperor, for more than a half-century, dying in 252. Eventually, the Wei defeated Liu Bei's son and conquered the Shu, then the Wei were deposed by the Jin Dynasty, which then conquered the Wu and reunited China in 280 after sixty years of division. Thank you, Wikipedia.)

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By an interesting coincidence, the discovery by Chinese archeologists of the tomb of the film's villain, Cao Cao, was just announced. Excavations have been going on since last year on the partially subterranean mausoleum in the village of Xigaoxue, in the Province of Henan. According to tradition, Cao Cao wished to be buried very simply, which reportedly is borne out by the fact that the tomb contains little in the way of precious artifacts. However, tradition also tells that Cao Cao had seventy-two tombs built in order to thwart robbers, so hopefully they have the right one.

Local School Makes Good

It almost killed me, but I made it through the fall semester in one piece, so now I'm free to return my attention to more important matters.

A couple weeks ago, my uncle Kevin back home in Portland sent me this article in the Portland Sentinel about native son Gus Van Sant's filming his next film, Restless (still "untitled project" according to IMDb; apparently neighborhood papers in Portland, Oregon, have better info than major, supposedly encyclopedic websites), in our former neck of the woods, North Portland. And not just anywhere in North Portland, but at Holy Redeemer School, where I went for eight years and you for three (if I remember correctly).

Knowing the transience of online information, I'll give you the lowdown in case the story's not available for long. Apparently, Gus was looking for a parking lot, and someone associated with the production, who has a kid at Holy Redeemer, suggested our alma mater. I'm sorry to say that it doesn't sound like the parking lot gets a lot of screen time, since they were only filming there one day (Veterans' Day, when it would be child-free), or which members of the cast were present. Speaking of the cast, it includes Mia Wasinkowska (from Tim Burton's upcoming Alice in Wonderland), Jane Adams (terrific as Joy in Todd Solondz's Happiness, one of my all-time favorite films—seriously, what does that say about me?), Chin Han (the evil Chinese businessman who gets shanghaied from Shanghai (I couldn't resist) by Batman in The Dark Knight), and Henry Hopper (Dennis's son). It's being produced by Van Sant, Ron Howard, his lovely daughter Bryce, and Hollywood über-producer Brian Grazer. Whether this means Restless will be one of Van Sant's more mainstream films, or one of his quiet, moody art-house works, remains to be seen.

Attached to the article is a video (by the looks of it, made using someone's phone) with an interview with Holy Redeemer's principal, as well as some shots of Holy Redeemer Church and the crew's trucks and equipment on Portland Boulevard (a.k.a. "Rosa Parks Way"). Obviously, I think this is pretty cool, especially since last year saw Wendy and Lucy (directed by Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy) and starring Michelle Williams), significant parts of which were filmed on Lombard Street just a few blocks down from our respective houses; in fact, my dad used to work at the store where a good deal of the film takes place, where Wendy's car is parked and she meets the security guard. Who knows, maybe before we know it the Saint Johns Bridge will be as cinematically iconic as the Brooklyn Bridge in Woody Allen's Manhattan, or the Kenton Paul Bunyan statue as memorable a landmark as the Hollywood Sign.

More on Restless in particular and the North Portland film industry in general as events merit.

The second-coming-of-age movie

ADVENTURELAND. THE GRADUATE. No this is not a post about a new coming-of-age movie about a 16-year-old boy who just wants to be a normal kid, but in addition to having an overworked single mother and absent father, he know has to come to terms with saving the world from sin. Although now I am imaging the second-coming involved in all sorts of roles, like the obvious Saved! in a from a few years ago in a gender-reversal situation, or possibly just J.C. himself singing "Somebody to Love (eternally)" with the kids from Glee.

But I digress. One of the most common storytelling archetypes is the coming-of-age story and the trend continues in film -- including in very two different way in a couple of this year's most discussed offerings, An Education and Precious (I would suggest staying tuned to this station for more on these in the coming days). My topic here is a less common, younger sibling that I'm calling the second coming of age. If the first occurrence comes with a young person realizing he/she is struggling to become an adult, the second occurs generally when the protagonist realizes -- generally post-college -- the reverse, that the grown-up world is not all its cracked up to be and perhaps he/she is not prepared for the world of adulthood. Having been through that time, and having less-than-fulfilling work in the immediate years after school, the topic has a certain resonance and I think I would say I'm a pretty good judge of their accuracy. Perhaps you are the same way. I would argue that this phenomenon itself has been growing for our generation as a whole, which is why I find it surprising that not just the best movie, but the most relevant movie was made in the 1960s: The Graduate (trailer).

Honestly the point of this movie is to write about how great that movie is an how miserable I am that no film since has captured that topic as well. Granted it is probably unfair to compare other movies to Mike Nichol's classic. Although most famous for its Mrs. Robinson plotline, a career-making performance by Dustin Hoffman, and a memorable soundtrack, what elevates the film from being simply a well-made, clever film to a cultural touchstone is how accurately it captures the theme. Nichol astutely chose to cast Hoffman instead of a WASPish actor as the novel depicts and crafts the story of a young man discovering he is out of place in his own community, his own family, and his own life. He finds himself in the situation he does because he is so lost and although I was neither alive in the 1960s nor dated one of my parents' friends, I can feel a great sense of empathy for Benjamin. Without quality filmmaking, it could have crossed over that dangerous line from honest and engaging to earnest. The Graduate triumphs because it never wallows in Benjamin's situation -- instead of hearing him whine about feeling out of place, we get to see him jump into a swimming pool in a diving pool surrounded by his parents' friends on his birthday. There is an actual story that exposes the themes of the movie instead of allowing the setup of a struggling post-college man dictate the events. That's what makes the movie timeless and after seeing it for the first time a few years ago, I could have been sworn it was written about my generation, not one older than my parents'.

Which brings me to the recent film, Adventureland (trailer), that prompted this post. It focuses on the same time in a young man's life but otherwise shares little more than the protagonist's nearly crippling awkwardness. Like Benjamin, James (Jesse Eisenberg -- or as I have heard him described, the guy they get when they can't afford Michael Cera) has just graduated from college but instead of departing on an engaging storyline, we simply have him dumped in an amusement park with mildly amusing characters as he whines about his predicament and looks to possibly lose his virginity with that fang-banger girl, Kristen Stewart. Benjamin is a character lost because he doesn't know how to fit in once he has left college, whereas I found myself watching James' interactions and wondering how he was functional enough to survive college socially. What 22-year-old does not think it is going to be a problem to go out on a date with a girl from work while trying to date another coworker? Or tell a girl in the first 10 minutes of a date about his (lack of) sexual experience? Sure this movie might be functionally a comedy (one could say the same about The Graduate, though), but there are too many scenes -- especially the last -- where it unsuccessfully walks that Apatowian line of funny movie with an emotional core to fully discount its attempts to be something more meaningful.

If Adventureland moves too much toward comedy, perhaps a closer relative is Garden State (trailer), a more serious movie that was commonly compared to The Graduate following its 2004 release. I personally remember it most for being a lot better than I expected, although in all honesty I thought it was going to be McAwful. Essentially it is the same setup as the aforementioned films except that the main character has taken a longer hiatus from home -- a good portion of high school and then a mostly failed attempt at acting that puts him at his mid-20s, I think -- and touches on the contemporary issues of psychology and overmedication, not to mention grief. Zach Braff, who wrote, directed and starred, does an affable job at building a mood and a good collection of scenes, but so much of it is too convenient and comes across as a film-school attempt. Although in many ways not as outlandish as Benjamin's affair with Mrs. Robinson, so much of the movie seems much less believe and built around making us see Andrew's isolation. This comes to a head in the final scene as well that swerves way too far into melodrama.

Which brings me around to my final conclusion about The Graduate is that by being more detached emotionally from what happens to its main character, it tells a much better story. The final scene of that movie is one of the more memorable of its decade, unlike the other two movies that left me wondering if even the good parts of the movie were supposed to be a build-up to an overly emotional crescendo. Contemporary film -- both in the large-scale action movies and especially the smaller, independent movies -- have been marked this decade by an emphasis on realism, frequently by borrowing aspects of documentary films. This often results in a detachment of the morality or the emotion from the plotline and allows the viewers to make judgments instead of the dialogue and the triumphant music doing it for them. Right now would be a perfect time for The Graduate to have been made (originally -- I am not advocating a remake!) and perhaps that is why it feels much more contemporary than either of those more recent films.

Owen Talks TV

The good folks over at the The A.V. Club have compiled a list of the thirty best TV series of the past decade. At the least, I'm pleased to see my taste in TV by and large vindicated. As I've said before, the three best TV series, in my opinion, are Arrested Development, Lost, and Band of Brothers. The first two are in The A.V. Club's top ten (at number three and number eight, respectively); Band of Brothers is nowhere to be found, but my guess is that they were ranking only open-ended series, not mini-series like Band of Brothers. Other favorites that make the cut are Freaks and Geeks (four), Mad Men (five), The Office (both British, at seven, and American, at eleven), 30 Rock (thirteen), Futurama (fourteen), Firefly (seventeen), Tim and Eric (twenty), Curb Your Enthusiasm (twenty-one), Undeclared (twenty-three), The Venture Brothers (twenty-six), Flight of the Conchords (twenty-seven), and Eastbound and Down (twenty-eight).

The number-one series, The Wire, is one I've been meaning to look into for some time now. (When my Netflix queue is in the nineties as it is, it's a bit daunting to add a five-season series to that. It will happen, though.) There are other series on the list that I've given a shot but wasn't able to get that into. Foremost of those is The Sopranos (number two), which is tantamount to heresy among lovers of quality television. I watched every episode of the first two seasons, so I can't be accused of not giving it a try; but I found it a bit contrived, and most of the characters downright caricatural. I watched the first season of Deadwood (nine), thought it was fun (especially Al Swearengen) but never rose to greatness. I watched at least the first season (maybe some of the second, I can't remember) of Six Feet Under (twenty-two), but found it a bit precious and hard to buy into; it didn't help that many of the main characters seemed like tired, broadly drawn stereotypes (the tight-laced housewife, the rebellious teenager, the contrasting obedient "good son" and free-spirited "bad son," etc.).

Something that struck me about the list is the networks that showed them. Half were on cable, and eight were on HBO alone. Among the broadcast networks, NBC and Fox led the pack with five and four shows, respectively. With a few ambitious exceptions (Lost, Firefly, The West Wing), the broadcast networks' quality shows were mostly relatively inexpensive comedies. I think this just goes to show the extent to which cable networks—first HBO, now AMC, FX, and Showtime as well—have come to dominate TV drama. Maybe it has to do with penny-pinching broadcast networks' increasing reliance on cheap reality and game shows, leaving a slack in the realm of high-quality drama that the cable networks have picked up. Not only that, but cable networks are able to focus their resources on a dozen or so episodes per season of a handful of shows, instead of having to produce several hours of programming every day for shows, each of whose seasons are usually at least two dozen episodes long (barring screenwriters' strikes, etc.). (On the other hand, maybe the distinction I've drawn between cable networks and broadcast networks is anachronistic, given that for some time now just about everyone in this country—excepting my parents, stubborn cable-free stalwarts that they are—has cable, and NBC, ABC, and Fox might very well be right next to HBO, AMC, and The Cartoon Network on the dial.)

The main thing that The A.V. Club's list demonstrates is that the past ten years have been a golden age of television. The medium has gone from being cinema's ugly cousin to a (perhaps the) recognized home of legitimate, high-quality acting and storytelling. Previously, a TV star only made it really big when he or she started making films; during the '00s ("the aughts"?), many established film actors (Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Salma Hayek, Keith Carradine, Bill Paxton, Steve Buscemi, just going by the shows on the list) took roles on TV, a move no longer seen as a step down careerwise. I think we should expect this trend only to continue in the future and to increase the quality and ambition of the programming, as more cable networks get in on the game HBO started.

One final thought: According to this list, Jason Segel may be the greatest television actor of the decade, with roles on Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, and How I Met Your Mother (number eighteen). Just doing the math, he's apparently a mighty TV force to be reckoned with. Who knew?

Best Date Movie Ever

ANTICHRIST

It's been about two weeks since I saw Lars von Trier's latest, most controversial film (trailer and clip), and I have to admit I haven't made a lot of headway in wrapping my head around it or parsing its many elements. (Not to point any fingers *ahem* but it hasn't helped that I haven't had anyone else to discuss it with.) So don't expect too much in the way of full-fledged analysis or brilliant insights here; I'll be the first to admit that with this film, I'm pretty far in over my head. I may not have really understood Antichrist, but I was awestruck nevertheless.

The film begins—its "prologue" is so similar stylistically to the opening sequence of The Fall, with its breathtakingly beautiful black-and-white photography of initially seemingly disparate images, shot in glacial slow-motion and silent except for its classical score (in Antichrist's case, Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga), that von Trier might need to worry about a call from Tarsem's lawyers—with a couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) passionately making love, while their toddler son escapes from his crib, climbs out an open window, and falls to his death. Months later, he seems to have come to terms with it, while she's still tormented by guilt and grief. A therapist, he's distrustful of her doctors and the medications they prescribe her and takes her emotional recovery upon himself; meanwhile, their marriage becomes increasingly strained, with their child's death bringing latent dissatisfactions and resentments to the surface. Insisting that she face her fears head-on in order to overcome them, he takes her to the place she says she fears the most: Eden, their isolated, rustic cabin in the woods. Once there, he has her undergo several tests and exercises in hopes of getting to the bottom of her feelings of guilt toward their son, her increasingly unstable (almost bipolar) feelings toward him, and her powerful, seemingly irrational fear of nature. (As she tells him at one point, chillingly dispassionately, almost as a non-sequitur, "Nature is Satan's church.")

Watching Antichrist, I was alternatingly entranced and repulsed. The cinematography is stunningly beautiful, especially of the woods surrounding Eden. Dafoe and Gainsbourg both deliver fantastic performances, particularly Gainsbourg (winner of the best-actress award at Cannes this year), who's at times coldly calm or indifferent, as if in shock, and at others bestially, ferociously passionate, with emotion pouring out from the depths of her soul. Thematically there's so much going on that I don't really know where to begin: gender, power, sexuality, guilt, fear, loss, revenge, violence, life and death, rationality, history, man in nature, man against nature, nature against man, fantasy and reality, archetypes, modernity, health, psychology, just for starters off the top of my head. A library's worth could be written about this film. It also doesn't flinch from depicting graphic violence and sex—in some cases at the same time. At times it was terrifying, gruesome, and pretty difficult to watch; that isn't a criticism, but puts in alongside other great, very unpleasant films like Requiem for a Dream, United 93, Funny Games, and Come and See.

A lot of the controversy surrounding Antichrist comes from its perceived misogyny, but that seems to be a somewhat simplistic take. It's true that the film's concerned with the differences, real or perceived, between men and women, and that in many ways the husband acts in a traditionally masculine fashion—rational, in control, methodological—while the wife acts in a traditionally feminine fashion—hyper-emotional, even hysterical at times, without the ability (or perhaps desire) to cordon off and set aside her feelings. But it would be a mistake simply to read the film as saying, "When men grieve for a dead child they're all like this, but when women grieve for a dead child they're all like this" (said like a bad stand-up comic). The wife ends up doing some pretty atrocious things to her husband and herself by the end of the film, but I can't really say yet that von Trier intended those things to be a condemnation of her or of women in general. (That's what keeps it from being an art-house torture-porn version of The Room; both von Trier and Wiseau made their films from an intensely personal, emotional place, but somehow I don't think von Trier made Antichrist to get back at a girl who'd dumped him.) I can't say I have a definite, or even vague, answer at this point, but there's just too much going on simply to write it all off as a woman-hating screed.

Though I may never muster the courage to watch it again, knowing now what I'd be getting myself into, Antichrist is certainly one of the best films of the year, and among the most beautiful, most challenging, and most frustrating I think I've ever seen. I've heard it described as von Trier's take on the horror genre; toward that end, he was able to imbue it with an unspoken sense of threat and foreboding long before the fantastical, bizarre, and gruesome events toward the end. (For instance, there's a very Lynchian shot, at the end of the scene early on of the husband visiting his wife at the hospital, that centers on the seemingly empty space between them and very slowly zooms in on the vase of flowers on the table beside her bed until the screen is filled with the green, murky water in the vase, as the monotonic score hums boomingly; very, inexplicably unsettling. Lynch is a master of making the mundane creepy; if you're going to borrow, borrow from the best.) I haven't seen much of von Trier's filmography, just Dancer in the Dark (trailer), another unpleasant film about which I found things both to like and dislike. Having seen Antichrist, I may have to man up and see some of his other films (about which I've heard good things, but which are supposed to be similarly hard on the audience); whatever the have in store for me, at this point I can't say I wasn't warned.

Cameron, the Wrath of God

AVATAR

FITZCARRALDO

In its October 26 issue, The New Yorker has a terrific article on James Cameron, whose Avatar (trailer), his first fictional film since Titanic twelve years ago, comes out in two months. After a hiatus second only to Terrence Malick or Guns N' Roses, will Cameron return to his '80s and '90s greatness or finally fall victim to his hubris? That in itself would make a pretty compelling story, which is one reason why the New Yorker article is a great read.

Though some of his films—The Terminator, Aliens, Terminator 2—are among my favorites, Cameron's work is far from perfect. It would be unfair to compare him to filmmakers like Scorsese, Copolla, or Aronofsky, but even compared to filmmakers in his own field his films don't evoke the wonder or old-fashioned charm of Spielberg or Lucas (though Titanic certainly harkens back to the Golden Age of Hollywood). (The only example that I can think of that does evoke that wonder and charm is the very Spielbergian end of The Abyss.) His attempts at subtext are usually simplistic dichotomies—man and machine, rich and poor, life-giving mother and life-taking killer, etc. However, when he's good, what he lacks in characterization, subtlety, and originality he makes up for in tense, masterfully coordinated action and technical wizardry.

I recently watched Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (trailer) for the first time, and I couldn't help but be reminded of it as I read the New Yorker article. The title character, played with captivating gusto by Klaus Kinski, is an unsuccessful developer in a town in the Peruvian Amazon in the early twentieth century; his true passion is opera, and he dreams of building an opera house in the small, isolated, jungle-circled town to host the Great Caruso and the other great voices of the day. The only way he can get the money for this is by buying a plot of land in the jungle known to be rich in rubber trees, but inaccessible thanks to river rapids and violent native tribes. In a Herzogian take on the classic underdog-challenges-the-odds story (darkly paralleled in his Aguirre, the Wrath of God (trailer), also starring Kinski), Fitzcarraldo is so driven by his dream that he ignores contrary advice, common sense, and sound boating practices in his attempt to reach his rubber trees, to the point of enlisting the natives to haul his river boat over a steep, muddy hill in the middle of the jungle.

While Cameron may not have the artistic creativity or knack for storytelling that many of his colleagues have, what the article conveys is an indominable drive, a stubborn refusal to do something on any terms but his own, a geeky enthusiasm for technical problems, and an aggressive single-mindedness sometimes bordering on obsession. On the one hand, his filmmaking style often comes across as a serious case of failing to see the forest for the trees (on page 60, first column, he takes very detailed notice of how light interacts with various tissues and structures of an alien creature's mouth), and on a personal level I'm not surprised that he's been divorced four times; but on the other, it's impressive—and in this day and age, honestly a bit inspiring—to see a filmmaker so passionately dedicated to making his film, regardless of technological contraints, problems with actors and crew, and doubtful studio executives. (In another unexpected similarity between the two, Herzog's consistent depiction in his films of nature as a hostile force parallels Cameron's view of a hostile Hollywood, his "environment.") While the end results may not be particularly groundbreaking or moving, they're not the result of compromise or indifference, but of sheer will.

P.S. — Speaking of Herzog, check this out. No wonder he sees the world as hostile.

Into the Wild

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. I tried to write this right away but a busy work schedule and then the unavailability of the Internet got in my way and eventually I felt more pressure. So now I am a bit late to the game when I could have been early! So I’m not going to waste any time because I have quite bit too say about this movie, for which the bar was set pretty high from the start. If I could have bought my ticket the day I heard it was being made I would have done so as it springs from a beloved book of my childhood and appeared to be one of the few occasions where something nostalgic was being made by a non-sellout director. Rare. Like nearly everyone within a certain demographic of my age group, just seeing the trailer was a phenomenal experience -- and not just because the exquisitely edited visuals perfectly paired with a haunting rerecording of a song by Arcade Fire were was pretty much lab tested to appeal to 20-somethings. It was a promise of a return to something cherished and after seeing the movie, I will say that it is certainly its own beast, but one that could create its own memories.

Having a younger sister and many younger cousins, I have seen many children's movies in my time and this film is notable if for nothing else the uniqueness of its approach of tailoring a story to be both about and for a child. Many of the people -- myself included -- who will enjoy this movie are well above the age of chasing a pet around the house in a wolf costume. Over the opening weekend only 27 percent of those seeing the movie were families as one might have guessed by the much of the advertising being aimed at an older audience. Because of its more mature appeal, it could indulge this opportunity and easily lose focus on how it reaches children in an age where most television and movies are eye candy -- especially those above the Sesame Street age. Neither of those are the point of this movie. There is a dirt-clod fight that I specifically remember thinking could put bad ideas in little boys’ heads and would be quite out of place on PBS. What this movie sets out to accomplish is reaching down -- quite literally -- to the child’s level to explore the world through his eyes and like a grown-up movie often does, explore an emotion a child feels and help him or her understand it a little better.

Children’s literature is generally much better than film at capturing this concept, even if it must do so with only a few words and generally fewer pictures. Take Where The Wild Things are, a book by Maurice Sendak published in the 1960s and comprising only nine scenes. In the story a young Max acts up and is sent to his room, from which he is transported to the land of the wild things where he becomes king and begins a wild rumpus, only to then return home where his food is still warm. What I remember in reading this myself -- and later as a fifth-grader helping a first-grader learn -- was the idea of wanting to escape for whatever reason, discovering that doing so isn’t all its cracked up to be, and concluding that maybe its better to find what’s waiting for you at home. Sure it might not explicitly state much of what I’ve surmised, but that is the nature of good literature. The book is remembered because little boys and little girls found some joy in the idea of exploring the unknown and comfort in warm supper at the end, even if as children they could not understand or express why.

So how does this movie fit in? Like the book, the movie follows Max (Portland native Max Records), who here is the imaginative son of a single mother (Katherine Keener), a loving but overstretched woman, and a sister too caught up in her own (pre?)teen world to spend time with her little brother or defend him against her friends. Most of the movie, however, takes place after he sails away to the land of the wild things and becomes king after bragging about powers he makes up on the spot when the initially terrifying creatures threaten to eat him. It soon turns out the monsters aren’t so monstrous after all and have been looking for a leader to solve their problems. There’s a great couple of lines that sum up this whole interlude of the movie and I will not spoil them here. What I will say is that the problem these creatures face is a relatable one: loneliness and the sadness it creates. I honestly cannot think of a children’s film that has the boldness to confront these ideas and spend its entire length exploring them from a child’s perspective. The land of the wild things is essentially Max’s manifestation of his sense of loneliness and his attempt to understand these feelings. I’m sure there are other films that deal with the motion, so perhaps it is not unique. But it is certainly uncommon.

When I say that the movie the follows Max’s perspective, I mean to say that director Spike Jonze, who is no stranger to letting imagination overtake reality, attempts to wholly recreate a world as Max would build it and as Max would see it. I did not make the connection until reading it in an article online, but a noticeable element of the superlative cinematography is how low the angles are that he choses. Combine this with the frequently manic camera work and you have an attempt to view the world as a child sees it -- expansive and frequently moving. The narrative flows is childlike as well in that, honestly, it often does not make sense. Fantastic and nonsensical elements move the plot along as Max never seems to make sturdy progress in his attempt to rid the land of sadness. It switches from forest to sea to desert so quickly that the geography could only have been plotted by a child. More than anything else, Max never seems to be precocious or able to solve all of the problems because he is somehow special. His logic doesn’t make sense except in the way that a child might try to solve a complex problem by assuming simple solutions like building a fort or having a dirt-clod fight would work. Overall the tone -- with not small nod to the brilliant voice work of James Galdolfini who, like in The Sopranos, excels at bringing a strong sense of melancholy to a character one would not automatically connect it to -- is inescapable and it is those who do not give children enough credit who will doubt that they can sense, even if they can’t explain, why they want Max to return home.

I expect a great deal of how well the movie relates to the concept of childhood sadness comes from cowriter Dave Eggers, whom I first thought an odd choice but after seeing the movie can understand. Eggers is a writer known for his creative nonfiction, such as A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, several novels and as the founder of the literary journal/publisher McSweeny’s. AHWOSG, a Pulitzer finalist, is a memoir of sorts about becoming, in his early 20s, the guardian of his much younger brother after both of their parents die in a fairly short period of time. His brother Toph, who I believe at the time of the deaths is about the age of Max, is the secondary main character of the story as Eggers writes about not just his own trials but those of a boy who his lost both parents. After watching the movie I could see how raising a boy who has watched both of his parents die would create a window into childhood sadness that very few are unfortunate enough to experience. Unsurprisingly the subject appears to be a reoccurring theme in his work, including in Away We Go, Eggers' first screenplay, which focuses on a couple pregnant with a child but features a side plot with a character who lost her parents at about the same age as Eggers. There is a bit of backlash in some circles to him that portrays him as smug and egotistical, citing McSweeny’s, AHWOSG (in fairness pretty much owns up to it there), his social-justice-themed series of books, and Away We Go. The last one I recently watched and I found it funny, although the characters in it do feed into the self-absorption critique of his work. The two protagonists are also presented as feeling and acting a bit superior to those they come across on their journey, who are mostly portrayed as deeply flawed in comparison. That said, I enjoyed the movie for the most part (although more so the broad comedy than the more serious moments). I think he has a future in screenwriting after seeing these two movies.

Side note here is that I am a bit disappointed in his decision to pen and essentially self-publish (through McSweeny’s) a 300-page novel treatment of what is already a fine picture book. We don’t need an emo version a children’s classic just because he either wants to cash in or be able to make his own mark on the story. Your movie is good enough.

This movie is also good enough to stand as a quite different but certainly adequate companion to the original book. I imagine that as a small child, one could become excited by reading about Max and looking at the pictures and, as the end of those single-digit years approaches, watch this movie and grasp a somewhat more mature yet still accessible story about growing up. I like to think that someday that same child could rewatch that movie (by downloading it directly to a TV or mobile device or however we will watch movies in coming years) as a teenager and discover the poetry of Jonze’s cinematography and then maybe later in his 20s see it again and get a little nostalgic and a little wistful in realizing those years of childhood innocence have passed. Critical review of the film have been mixed and I think it might be the type where those reviewing are too far from childhood to see how a young could understand this movie and perhaps those of us who grew up in a world much more isolated than those of our parents find the themes of the movie more compelling. I have heard many people talk about how much they have liked the movie and one in particular mentioned that one should sees it with someone special and I think there is a reason for that: this is the type of movie you want others to experience with you. For all its sadness the movie itself is not really sad -- it is in fact just the opposite. It is about finding comfort. That more than anything is why I think this book can appeal to children and that is why this is the type of movie that I, like many others, can't help but want to share.

P.S. To stay in compliance with new FTC regulations, I should mention that I received a free pass to a screening of the movie provided by the studio.

"A Serious Man": First Thoughts

A SERIOUS MAN

This won't be a full-blown review, analysis, or treatise, but just an initial thought or two about A Serious Man (trailer) while it's fresh on my mind.

Maybe the "first rabbi," Rabbi Scott (Simon Helberg), is right. Maybe it is all about perspective after all. That's my impression, at least right now, about what the film's abrupt, Sopranos-esque ending. Young Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff) spends the whole film worrying about preparing for his bar mitzvah, evading a beating from Mike Fagle (Jon Kaminski), and getting his head set back. In the end, however, he's left staring at a tornado a couple of blocks away and getting closer, as the Hebrew school teacher struggles to unlock the door to the basement. At the same moment, his father Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg) finds out the results, unspoken but undoubtedly bad, of the medical tests he took at the beginning of the film. In the face of serious illness or even of death, everything we've seen him enduring over the course of the film—divorce, Sy Ableman, tenure, Uncle Arthur's cyst, the Jolly Roger, "culture clash" with Clive Park, the neighbor's mowing habits, unwanted mail-order records, Mrs. Samsky, the goy's teeth, and F Troop—pales in comparison. Both father and son have worried about a multitude of problems that, in those final moments, suddenly shrink to insignificance in the face of impending death. Now that's perspective.

Ode to Rambunctiousness

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

Let me begin with a little understatement: It was worth waiting in line outside the Silver Theater for almost an hour to see this early.

It seems strange to me that Where the Wild Things Are (trailers) is only Spike Jonze's third film as director—following Being John Malkovich and Adaptation—and his first in seven years. He's been so busy over the years shooting music videos, producing films (most notably those with Charlie Kaufman as screenwriter and/or director), "presenting" The Fall, and, of course, giving the world Jackass, that his impact in contemporary cinema seems greater than his relative dearth of films would suggest. It certainly doesn't hurt that Being John Malkovich and Adaptation are two of the best, most original, most visionary films of the past ten years. I guess I can't complain that he doesn't sit in the director's chair very often if it means that when he does, he knocks it clear out of the park.

Moving on from my man-crush on Jonze's filmography, I'd like to say a few words about the source-material. I guess my love for Sendak's book is hardly unusual, since whole generations have enjoyed it since its publication in 1963. There were other books of his on my shelves as well, In the Night Kitchen and an illustrated edition of The Nutcracker (with great, scary depictions of the Mouse King); needless to say, the illustrations were the real pleasure of these books, with their distinctiveness, imagination, and attention to detail. But particularly dear to my heart was a stuffed Bull-Headed, Human-Footed Wild Thing (the one dozing on the book's cover; simply called "the Bull" in the film), one of the key figures in my childhood stuffed-animal menagerie.

The reason I mention these things from my childhood is because that's what Where the Wild Things Are, book and film alike, are about. That seems like a no-brainer given that one is a children's book and the other (to an extent) a children's film; but unlike many such stories, childhood isn't just the setting, it's the subject. This is especially apparent in the film, which has a bit more time to spend with Max and more opportunity to explore and dwell on themes that were merely implicit in Sendak's book. Max, played by Portlander Max Records (previously seen this summer in Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom (trailer and clip), in which, interestingly, he played his WTWTA co-star Mark Ruffalo's character as a child), is a quintessential child—or, more precisely, a quintessential little boy. Everything that is present in a human being—joys, loves, thoughts, fears, angers, energy, enthusiasm—is bubbling up inside him, but without an adult's ability to hide or control it. There's no dissimulation with him; if he thinks or feels something, good or bad, he'll let you know. However, this is slowly being tempered by recognition of the consequences of his actions. For instance, after his sister hurts his feelings early on, he trashes her room, destroying a little home-made present from him to her in the process; his mother finds out and makes him clean up, but you can tell that what he's done dawns on him not when he's punished, but in the heartbreaking moment when he looks down at the destroyed present on the floor and futilely tries to put it back together.

If his lack of self-control means that he often acts out, even against the ones he loves, it also means that his imagination and creativity know no bounds. He hasn't yet been told that his ideas are stupid, that he needs to get a grip and be reasonable, that the sky isn't the limit—or, if he has, he hasn't begun believing it. Every situation for him is an opportunity for creativity, from building igloos in the snow to making forts in his bedroom to daydreaming in class to making up stories off the cuff for his mother. Going to the Wild Things' island is such a natural extension of this that he doesn't seem to think any of it is unusual in the slightest. At first, his life on the island is just an extension of his life back home, with all its creativity and overabundance of energy, but without the restraints of being told what to do (he is the King, after all). But eventually the senses of responsibility, regret, and consequence begin to appear there as well; feelings are hurt, relationships strained, people lash out with emotions they haven't yet learnt to articulate. Max returns home at the end because he realizes in some way that he can't retreat from growing up, that he has to learn how to deal with real life instead of running away from it.

I can't recall seeing such an honest, realistic depiction of what it's like to be a kid. Its focus isn't on the subjects of so many other children's stories—having fun, or solving childhood problems, or learning The Moral Of The Story, though those are present as well—but on childhood itself, on learning about yourself and other people, often painfully, on enjoying the comfort and security of swaddling clothes while straining against them at the same time. After seeing Where the Wild Things Are and how true and honest its vision of childhood is, I can't help but wonder if the majority of children's writers and filmmakers remember what it was like to be a child, or can relate at all to the children in their lives. Spike Jonze clearly does remember, and that's what his film captures: a full recollection of what childhood was like—joyous and limitless, but also fragile, inarticulate, and confused—but from an adult's perspective, knowing what will inevitably follow after. Where the Wild Things Are is a sincere, truthful, beautiful, deeply touching achievement.

And if all that weren't enough, Max and the Wild Things' dirt-clod fight might be the best action set-piece of the year.

Die Yuppie Scum!

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

I'd like to begin by offering a hearty "hear hear!" to Mr. Sendak.

Moving on, as I've said before, I'm by no means a horror aficionado. However I like to think that doesn't prevent me from being able to distinguish the good examples from the bad. I agree that, despite its weaknesses, Paranormal Activity is one of the good examples. For me, really the sole interest run-of-the-mill horror films have for me is the gruesome deaths, which are rarely, if ever, genuinely scary; they're so formulaic that you can almost always see them coming a mile away, so it's really about the sadistically gleeful anticipation of some hapless red shirt's demise. On the other hand, we have films like The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, Psycho, Alien, Carrie, Rosemary's Baby, The Orphanage, The Ring (I mean the Japanese original; I haven't seen the American remake), The Others, and del Toro's films, which earn their scares by slowly, carefully building suspense instead of just hacking apart a bunch of people the audience doesn't care about. As you note, however, films like these are much more the exceptions than the rule, with audiences—if the vocally unsatisfied theatergoers leaving Paranormal Activity as we waited for our screening were any indication—evidently prefering a rapid series of graphic kills to slow-burning tension that actually gets under your skin.

(As a side note, I don't see how you can claim that "horror" has become too denigrated to use as the name of this genre, especially when the name you suggest in its place is "scary movie." Now that's denigration.)

On the plus side, Paranormal Activity eschews a series of graphic kills and jack-in-the-box scares in favor of establishing characters in whom the audience can invest, setting it in realistic surroundings, preying on real-life anxieties (I think people are more freaked out by weird sounds in the night than by hockey-mask-wearing mutes out in the woods), and giving the film time to build genuine suspense. On the minus side, however, the scares are almost always even easier to see coming than in your standard slasher movies. I knew that something was coming each and every time we saw the late-night footage of their bedroom, and knew exactly when it was coming when the footage stopped fast-forwarding; I mean, after the second or third time I literally just watched the clock in the lower-right corner and waited for it to stop fast-forwarding. The only uncertainty at that point was what was going to happen each time, which the film generally did a good job with; I was genuinely surprised when Katie stood beside the bed for hours, and when she was dragged out of bed and down the hall.

Another problem with the film was the characters, Micah—your name's pronounced "My-cah," dummy, not "Mee-cah"—and Katie. They reminded me of the characters in Cloverfield, lazy, privileged, self-absorbed yuppies I couldn't care less about and in fact was actively rooting against. (My thanks to Patrick Bateman for this post's title.) This was only magnified by what an absolute tool Micah is in almost every scene of the film, going from poo-pooing Katie's fears and the psychic's warnings about antagonizing the spirit, to taking it so seriously that he seems to want to take it on single-handedly out of unthinking macho bravado. (I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd challenged the spirit to "throw down, chief!") Speaking of the psychic, I kinda couldn't blame Micah for not taking him seriously, with his talking about these phenomena with practically scientific exactitude ("It's a demon, not a ghost." "In such situations, what typically happens is..."); maybe there's a peer-reviewed journal he could refer them to (other than the picture book Micah was reading and treating like a scientific textbook). Katie was the best character in that I didn't actively dispise her, though I couldn't help but keep thinking of her as Pam Beesley with bigger breasts and no job. (Actually, it would've been great if we'd had Jim and Pam instead of Micah and Katie; a lot more wisecracking and mugging for the camera.) That's another thing, how contrived was it to have Micah be a day trader (remember those?) and Katie a grad student, just to give them an excuse to stay at home all day, every day talking to the camera? Are we seriously supposed to believe that an unmarried twenty-something couple can afford a beautifully furnished three-bedroom house in San Diego, a convertible, and a graduate-level education simply by trading stocks online (when he isn't following Katie around with the camera)?

These problems with the characters weren't helped by the actors' performances, which were basically community-theater level. I realize they aren't supposed to seem like "actors," but when almost the whole film is spent with the camera in their faces, I can tell the difference between "real people" and "bad actors." (There are plenty of examples of great performances by nonprofessional actors, such as the Italian neorealists (de Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D., Pasolini's The Gospel According to Saint Matthew), Black Orpheus, Van Sant's Elephant and Paranoid Park, Bruno S. in Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek, R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, and Oscar-winner Dr. Haing Ngor in The Killing Fields.)

So I think that Paranormal Activity has a lot going for it, and I would recommend it to those tired of slasher flicks and torture porn and looking for a breath of fresh air in the horror genre. I wouldn't recommend it to those looking for good acting, enjoyable characters, or scary scenes in which you can't predict with pin-point accuracy when the scare is going to come.

P.S. — By "the classic that was filmed in our area," I assume you're referring to Body of Evidence (trailer), filmed in Portland and starring the acclaimed thespian Madonna.

Coming Soon: An official OMTM screening

OK maybe not official, but we are seeing an early screening of Where the Wild Things Are on Tuesday and you can expect a Siskel & Ebert treatment soon afterward. And this gives me an excuse to post this quote from Maurice Sendak in a Newsweek interview (via Gawker) when he was asked for his response to those who say the movie is too scary for children:
And also an excuse to one more time feature this for those who have not watched it yet. And if you have not watched it yet, I seriously question why you read this blog.

Do you like scary movies?

Seeing as how it is now October, it seems about time to bring up the topic of Halloween movies, and I do not mean necessarily Michael Myers. Well that and we saw Paranormal Activity (trailer) and it got me thinking of how movies tackle the idea of terror in movies. I personally have a love-hate relationship with "horror" movies. The love part is that I leave being scared and the hate part comes because most of them are, well, bad is probably a nice way to put it. My dislike of the concept of genre rears its head again as a number of awful movies are made with no effort at quality because they are unabashedly genre movies and supposedly are not expected to do anything more than just cause teenagers with too much time on their hands to jump out of their chairs a few times and maybe shout at the screen. When a slasher movie gets its frights out of exposing the audience to gruesome visuals or delivers jack-in-the-box-like effects toward the screen, I just yawn. Sure those moments when something pops in front of the screen might make me jump as much as the next guy, but in between those scenes I could care less. Gore for the sake of gore also does nothing for me and consequently the emergence of torture porn to supplant the scream queens had not improved the situation.

So that being said, film is a great medium for scaring people and it disappoints me that so few movies take advantage of the opportunity. The big screen and dark auditorium -- at least for those who see it at a theater -- are probably the best environment to escape reality and the tools a filmmaker has in controlling the visuals and audio allow manipulation of mood and tone that are much less effective in realms such as theater and books. Consequently there are a number of scary movies (a term I prefer to horror because of the way that word has been denigrated in the realm of film) that I enjoy quite a bit and those experiences where I am on the edge of my seat in suspense make up some of my favorite film watching. I think I have mentioned to you that when I lived in Alabama I would try to rent movies that would legitimately scare me as a way to make my life more interesting. So I've seen The Omen and Cujo and What Lies Beneath (the last one being one of the scarier of the startling movies) among others, but would not say I am an expert. So the point of this post is just to toss out some titles I think are worth watching in the month of October and perhaps start a discussion with you and maybe even our readers on what could be added to the list.

I should start the list by discussing the movie we just watched -- Paranormal Activity. The best part of watching this movie was that I knew nothing about it going in aside from the fact that it was made for like $10,000 (which I now discover is $15,000), which is truly the best way to go into it. Although I'm fairly certain that pretty much the extent of our readership was at the movie with us, I will shy away from saying too much about the plot so as not to give any spoilers and allow others to have the same experience as me. But the basic idea is a mocumentary of a young couple trying to catch on film evidence of a paranormal entity in their home. The entire movie takes place at the house and uses the unknown to create the tension in the movie. It slowly builds to the point where every time it would show the couple lying in bed, the audience would either gasp our shout at the screen in anticipation of what slight addition to the story would develop (side note there: this is not a movie for the standard horror crowd and is much slower and character-centric, leading to a lot of screaming when it was not that kind of a scare and complaining by the mostly teenage crowd in the theater with us that the movie was lame). What I liked about the movie is that it felt believable even though I do not believe in the paranormal, ghosts, demons, etc. and I did find my heart beating faster as it built toward the climax. It did seem to start out awfully slow, but on the whole the ability of the movie to slowly ratchet up the tension was rather masterful. You have mentioned you are considering writing about this film so although there is a lot more I find fascinating about this movie, I think I will leave that either to yours or a possibly response to your post. I already saw as I was writing this post that a commentator brought up particularly noteworthy element, which is that there was a Hollywood remake planned but scrapped when they decided to just release what they had already in the can (original version FTW!).

So on to the topic of other scary movies. The obvious relative to this is The Blair Witch Project -- another low-budget mocumentary made with no script and for next to nothing. That film, about people terrified in the woods, scared a lot of people and left many others not knowing what to think. A number of people told me they didn't find it scary at all and in conversing I came to realize they were not scared because there weren't a lot of those startling moments as found in many horror movies. In other words, the dumbing-down of the movie of film horror has meant that we expect immediate gratification of being frightened instead of having a movie slowly get under our skin. I would say that this movie is one I wouldn't mind watching again as I can honestly say I hardly remember it. What I do recall, however, is feeling like I was genuinely sharing in the terror that the characters were experiencing, and in that Paranormal Activity lived up to its predecessor.

So what other movies can I think of that I enjoyed? I don't want to exhaust the list so I will just list a few good examples of scary movies. The gold standard in my book (as mentioned before) is The Shining -- a Stanley Kubrick interpretation of Stephen King's novel starring Jack Nicholson. There are several reasons this movie is so scary and I would summon it up to three main reasons: (1) Kubrick is a master of using the visuals to throw the audience off guard, (2) the terror in the movie is very down-to-earth and realistic, and (3) Nicholson's creepy performance -- one of the best of his career.

Foreign horror movies are not generally an area in which I am an expert (I leave that more to you), but the political and familial aspects of The Host made it a great modern monster/scary movie and I like the way that Guillermo del Toro uses a sense of history in The Devil's Backbone to tell a story that is both more fantastic yet realistic as it draws a connection between the horror of war and that of the undead. He uses a similar approach in the more acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth, but I found the earlier movie to be more in line with a scary movie.

With that I have thrown some titles out there, but I have certainly not exhausted the list (in fact, I have left out a classic that was filmed in our area) and look forward to seeing if you or any others have more to add to the list.

Ø Brothers, Where Art Americanized Remakes?

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

On second thought and sober reflection, that's a really dumb post title. Oh well, it stays.

Though I haven't seen the original Danish version of Brothers (and my time machine's in the shop, so I haven't seen the American remake either), you raised some interesting points in your last post that I'd like to address.

To remake or not to remake. Whether 'tis nobler to introduce great stories from foreign films to wider American audiences, or just to say "No, sorry, sometimes watching a great work of cinema means having to read a little." It's kinda a tough call. My first instinct is to condemn remakes, updates, reboots, etc. and to encourage people to embrace the original instead, even if it's in another language, in black and white, or doesn't have any actors you recognize from the covers of People, Us Weekly, or Tiger Beat. But that would make me a hypocrite, wouldn't it, since only a couple posts ago I was gushing over a trio of great remakes. There have been plenty of good, even great, remakes of older foreign films, from The Departed, which you mentioned, to The Good Thief (based on Melville's Bob le Flambleur), Twelve Monkeys (based on La Jetée), A Fistful of Dollars (based on Kurosawa's Yojimbo), and, of course, Star Wars (based on The Hidden Fortress, also by Kurosawa). (Here is a handy list of English-language remakes of foreign films. Of course, this kind of influence is a two-way street; for example, two of Kurosawa's films, Throne of Blood and Ran, are based on Shakespeare, Macbeth and King Lear respectively.)

One particularly interesting example, discussed previously, is Funny Games, originally made in 1997 in German, remade in 2008 in English. Both were directed by Michael Haneke (who won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last spring for his most recent film, The White Ribbon), using the same script and all the same shots; the only differences were the actors and the language. I suppose Haneke did this to expose a wider audience to the ideas in the original; I doubt he was just trying to cash in on the American market, since there are a lot more audience-friendly stories out there if you're just trying to make a buck. Regardless of his motivation, it almost can't be considered a remake, since there's virtually no creative difference between it and the original; except for the actors' performances, you might as well be watching a dubbed version of the original.

The main reason why this issue is of interest to me is the forthcoming American remake of the 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In (trailer), my number 2 film of that year. It has fantastic, understated performances, particularly on the parts of its child-leads, Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson; its cinematography and music create a beautiful, almost dreamlike atmosphere; and the story has a mixture of innocence, uncertainty, and fear that's particularly appropriate for a film about adolescence. Oh yeah, and it has a deathless minion of Hell damned to feed on the living for all eternity, so basically it's the total package. It's been out on DVD for a while now, and I would've bought it in a heart beat, but the English subtitles in the DVD version are significantly different, and vastly inferior, to those in the theatrical version. Why they would do that I have no idea, but it breaks my heart; I'm almost tempted just to learn enough Swedish to avoid the subtitles altogether. The North American distributer, Magnolia Films, has said it would release a version with the theatrical subtitles, but I haven't seen it yet. This isn't the first time I've been burnt by shoddy subtitles to the foreign films I love; I saw Park Chan-wook's Oldboy twice in theaters, and I'm positive the subtitles in my DVD are different. Seriously, this crap make me pull my hair out.

To get back on topic, the American remake is scheduled for release next year, with Matt Reeves (The Pallbearer (a David Schwimmer vehicle—I didn't even know there was such a thing), Felicity, Cloverfield . . . ugh) directing. Some casting news came out recently, with Kodi Smit-McPhee (soon to appear in the adaptation of The Road) and Chloë Moretz (recently in (500) Days of Summer, also in the upcoming adaptation of the comic book Kick-Ass) as the two kids and Richard Jenkins as the girl's "guardian." It's good to see they're keeping the kid characters young (Smit-McPhee is 13, Moretz 12) instead of going the more bankable, less squicky route of teen actors, as is Oscar-nominee Jenkins's involvement. There had previously been noises that Philip Seymour Hoffman would get that role, but I won't lose any sleep over Jenkins getting it instead. Hoffman would've captured the sad-sack-schlub aspect of the original's character (I'm imagining his roles in Happiness and Synecdoche, New York), but Jenkins can evoke a tired, forlorn quality (seen to such great effect last year in The Visitor) that I think would work great as well.

Though the casting seems promising, other elements—in addition to Reeves's filmography—are less so. First off, it may get a different title, "Let Me In" or "Fish Head." The former refers to a particular scene in the film, but in a slightly more obvious way than "Let the Right One In" does; as for "Fish Head," I haven't the slightest clue. Also, the original's director, Tomas Alfredson, made the good point that it doesn't make a lot to sense to remake what is already a fantastic film, especially so recently afterward. It threatens to distract from the original people who might otherwise see it, offering in its place a work that, even if as good as the original, is merely piggy-backing on its ideas.

In a move that may work for or against his film, Reeves apparently wants to hew more closely to John Lindqvist's novel. (Of course, he's already failing to do that by changing the setting from Sweden to the United States, isn't he?) I mention this because it's good to keep in mind when discussing remakes that the original film isn't always a canon from which any deviation is necessarily wrong; originals are themselves often based on their own source material, deviation from which may help or hurt them. So we'll have to see what impact that has.

Another reason the remake leaves a bad taste in my mouth is that it seems a bit like a cashing-in on the explosion of all things vampiric in popular culture right now. (A few years ago it was zombies, starting with Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later in 2002; the zombie renaissance seems to have mostly burnt itself out by this point, except for the occasional film like Zombieland that takes a slightly different approach from the well-worn "motley crew of survivors spend the running time killing the undead in gruesomely creative ways, most of them dying themselves along the way" template.) Since Stephanie Meyer's Twilight novels started making big bucks, it seems like you can't walk ten feet without seeing a new vampire-themed film or TV series, be it the films Twilight and New Moon, True Blood, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, Daybreakers, the inexplicable continuance of the Underworld franchise, etc., etc., etc. On the one hand, Reeves has some of the best source material—cinematic and (presumably) literary—that one could hope for; on the other, he is apparently going in a more "accessible" direction. As long as he doesn't have his young vampiress sparkling or playing baseball, I guess that'll be some kind of victory, at least.

Anyway, that's what I have to say about American remakes of foreign films (at least until I see either version of Brothers and can comment directly). I also agree that there doesn't seem to have been any high-quality films about the Afghan or Iraqi wars other than Kathryn Bigelow's outstanding The Hurt Locker this summer. I don't have a whole lot to say on this point; honestly, I think The Hurt Locker is the first I've seen because, well, the others weren't supposed to be that great. Maybe it's a matter of needing a little more distance from the subject matter, maybe it's just the fact that, regardless of subject matter, a lot more crappy movies are made than good ones. Keep in mind that it took a while for films like The Deer Hunter (1978), Coming Home (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986), and Full Metal Jacket (1987) to come out; prior to that, it had mostly been the Duke kicking VC ass in The Green Berets.

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On an unrelated note, here are some great, insightful interviews with Stanley Kubrick, the tenth anniversary of whose death was last March. There's one each on A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining. Enjoy!