Over the past month or so I’ve been getting quasi-obsessed with the television show Heroes. I watched Season 1 (very good) and Season 2 (very bad) on DVD and I’ve also been watching the current Season, 4.

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Last night I had a dream that was backstory for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. I was a young girl in a very wealthy family and the Basterds were using our decrepit summer estate for training. My mother cautioned me very strongly against associating with the Basterds but I think I sort of had a thing for Donny (aka the Bear Jew) who I referred to as a Golem.

I’ve deeply drawn to the films of Lars Von Tier. There’s something about his worldview that validates the pessimism about human nature that I feel as a chronic depressive. Stephan Rylance’s review of Von Tier’s lastest movie, AntiChrist, really clarified this aspect of Von Tier’s work for me.

The Agonies of an Antichrist by Stephan Rylance

On the liter side is “Truly, Truly Outragous”, an article on Samantha Newark who was the speaking voice of Jem (Britta Phillips was her singing voice) on the 1980’s cartoon series Jem and the Holograms. Jem was a great show and the interview addresses it’s gay appeal and even mentions fan fiction.

Truly, Truly Outrageous by Noah Michelson

During August and September when I was still working at the supermarket I developed a daily after work ritual—I’d put on the soundtrack to Inglourios Basterds and polish off an entire bottle of wine while playing Farmville on Facebook. It’s only been a little more than a month but I already feel a combination of horror and deep nostalgia for that time in my life. The soundtrack however I have only enthusiasm for. It was recently posted on The American Nightmare, a music blog I sometimes follow and I would strongly recommend it.

Inglorious Basterds Soundtrack at The American Nightmare

On Friday I went to an exhibit at the Fenimore Art Museum called “American’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City 1800-1900 that spotlighted the Roman themed work of 19^th century American Artists. The exhibit included many painting of ruins and the commentary on these featured a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun that I really liked:

“(America is) a land where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight… Romance and poetry need Ruin to make them grow.”

Reading this I couldn’t help but add horror to Hawthorne’s list of ideas that require Ruin to thrive. Horror often mines ancient evils. Hawthorne himself looked back to his puritan ancestors in House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter. Later H. P. Lovecraft would create a dark New England of sinister in-bred ghouls and otherworldly terrors. Stephan King’s characters stir up paranormal discord by unearthing Indian burial grounds. America then does have its picturesque and gloomy wrongs, either uncovered or created, but I can see the appeal of European settings, of the “old world” and its imagery. Though it’s been tarnished by war, murder, injustice, evil and insanity America remains comparatively shiny and new.

In Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell there’s an amazing chapter where William Gull gives a tour of London spanning from druid times to the present day, revealing layer upon layer of history and mystery. It’s simply not possible to give such a tour of an American city. Because Native American culture and lore was essentially erased even the oldest parts of the country only go back a few centuries. The idea of a thousand or even two thousand years of documented, known, decaying history fascinates me.

It doesn’t surprise me that many of Edger Allen Poe’s most popular short stories are set in a mythical Europe and draw on centuries old imagery of the inquisition, skeleton filled catacombs and ancient family lineages. I thought of stories like The Pit and the Pendulum, Masque of the Red Death and The Fall of the House of Usher when I read Hawthorne’s quote.

I also thought of Hostel, a film I watched a couple of weeks ago for the first time. An extremely violent tale of American’s abroad who are lured to a hostel that provides victims for those willing to pay to murder and torture, Hostel was widely criticized when it was released for exploiting post-9/11 xenophobia and paranoia. Meditating on the quote by Hawthorne however I feel like it belongs in an older, gothic tradition where the American consciousness is mesmerized and frightened by the mystery and gloomy wrongs of an older world.

Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is one of those books that I’ve loved as both a little girl and a grown woman. Visually it appeals to me enormously, the illustrations are gorgeous, but beyond that I’ve always been fascinated by the story (simple and epic all at once), by Sendak’s sly sense of humor, by the sense of joy and the edge of darkness the book contains. In a lot of ways Where the Wild Things Are has always struck me as a story that works on a primeval, Jungian level charting the child’s process of identity building in a mythic fable. Growing up is like Max’s journey. You over step boundaries, you reject authority, you play with other roles and unacceptable behavior, you run amok but then hopefully you return your parents, your home, to love and safety and order.

I felt like Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are film did a really good job with the difficult task of adapting Sendak’s book. The movie is visually striking in its own right and doesn’t slight either the playfulness or the sometimes menacing edginess of the original.

Screenwriters Jonze and David Eggers stay true to the narrative outlines sketched by Sendak while fleshing out the story. We see a bit more of Max’s home life than the book shows. Nine year old Max (Max Records) is an extremely creative little boy with a rambunctious streak. His older sister can’t be bothered with him and his divorced, working mother loves and encourages him, but sometimes she kind of wants a life of her own. At school his science teacher talks about the sun dying. Wanting attention, confused, angry, sad and frightened all at once Max lashes out. First he trashes his sister’s room after her friends wreck the igloo he’s built. Then he behaves badly indeed when his mother has a (male) friend over for dinner, eventually biting her before he flees.

Max arrives in the world of the Wild Things to find one of them, Carol, in the process of breaking things. Max immediately identifies, as well he should. The Wild Things, especially Carol, are like giant, motherless children. Theirs is an id level world of joyful rough and tumble anarchy on one hand and frightening destructive violence on the other. Initially they consider eating Max but when he assures them he can do away with sadness and loneliness and make it so they’re happy all the time they make him their king. They all have wonderful, raucous fun together and Max sets them to work building the ultimate fort but the family of the Wild Things is no without it’s conflict and Max isn’t able to make them go away. Carol ultimately becomes as frustrated with Max as Max became with his mother and like Max lashes out.

The themes of the fallibility of authority figures and the currents of destructiveness that exist even in loving families are new to the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. There was a certain gleeful amorality to Sendak’s version but in the film it’s spelled out more clearly the ways Max grows through his experiences among the Wild Things—he returns because his time as king has taught him empathy for his mother.

I’m going to see the film version of Where the Wild Things Are tomorrow.  I’m really excited about it since it’s based on what probably was my most favorite picture book when I was little.  

 

My mother is going with me, she’s a children’s book dealer and loves Maurice Sendak (as do I).  Of course I sort of got her to accompany me on false pretenses.  I deliberately failed to mention to her that Where the Wild Things are was directed by Spike Jonze, the man who brought us Being John Malkovich.  I’m not sure how or why, but years ago mum somehow managed to get into a showing of Being John Malkovich and will occasionally make reference to “that awful film with the lesbians.”  Mum really is-- how do they say it-- a piece of work.

In lieu of a carefully constructed and well thought out review (I have to write one at some point) a few random thoughts on my favorite basterds….

I’ve really never found Brad Pitt attractive. Maybe it’s because I associate him with dark, goofball roles in films like Seven Monkeys and Kalifornia. Even in Fight Club he stuck me as more goofy than sexy. His Inglourious Basterds character, who I see as a sort of a dumb, vicious cracker is funny doesn’t really hold much appeal for me.

Sgt. Donnie Donowitz aka “The Bear Jew” (Eli Roth) is definitely built but a little too violent for my tastes. Also he directed Hostel, which may or may not make him a truly frightening individual.

Overall I’d have to say that Pfc. Smithson Utivich aka “The Little Man” (B. J. Novak) is my favorite of the Inglourious Basterds. I love the way he’s nervously drinking wine during the last scene when he and Lt. Aldo Raine have been captured by Landa and are basically negotiating the terms to end the war. It’s one of the few endearing traits displayed by a character in the film.

Second favorite Basterd (and I wish the film had gotten in a little more of him) is Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) cuz he’s just crazy, motherfucker. There’s a moment we look inside his head and there are whips and chains.

Tarantino’s latest film Inglourious Basterds opens tomorrow.  It looks pretty ugly and violent, yet I find that I’m still excited to see it.  Kill Bill was released right after I moved to Chicago and was the first film I saw on my own in the city.   Inglourious Basterds will probably be the last film I watch as a resident of Chicago and I guess I see an odd sort of synchronicity to this. 

I first read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen when I was working at Cooperstown Baseball Cards and Comics between my Junior and Senior years of high school. That was 1989, which means I’ve been a fan of Watchmen for almost 20 years. During that time, I’ve periodically reread the graphic novel and always found some new nuance or insight to the story. Watchmen is an amazing, complex, highly detailed, novelistic and densely multi-layered work and I will admit I had serious doubts that it could be successfully adapted to the screen. After all, isn’t Watchmen first and foremost a comic book about comic books?

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I’m not really sure when or how Atonement ended up in my Netfix queue.  I saw a couple previews for it in the theater last year and didn’t really have any burning desire to see it.  High-minded epics about good looking people falling in love against the scenic backdrop of history really aren’t my thing. Still, the DVD showed up in my mailbox and a watched it. 

 

As it turned out, Atonement was infinitely more interesting than I’d ever imagined.

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A friend of mine from work, who’s an actor, is really excited to see Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush bio-pic W.  He’s a big fan of Josh Brolin (No County For Old Men) who plays the title role and says that based on the clips it seems like Brolin really becomes George W. Bush. 

 

From the standpoint of the actor’s craft I can understand my friend’s eagerness to see the film but I can’t say I share it.  First of all, after eight years of his presidency, spending three hours with a convincing George W. Bush is really the last thing I want to do.  Second, what’s the point of making a SERIOUS, IMPORTANT, HISTORICAL type film about a presidential administration that hasn’t even ended?  With comedy you can get away with presenting an of the moment take on things but how can you have any true insight on a situation that’s still unfolding?  Who knows how things will look in five or ten years and what new information will come out.

 

While I suppose it’s a testament to American freedom of speech that you can release a major film that paints an unfavorable, sensationalistic portrait of a national leader I really can’t imagine W having a whole lots of artistic merit.  I’ve seen enough Oliver Stone films to know that the man has no sense of humor and a taste for the lurid so I have a feeling that W is going heavy handed, polarizing  propaganda with cocaine orgies or scenes of  underwear clad fraternity hazing tossed in. 

 

Maybe I shouldn’t judge sight unseen but I really have no desire to see.

Keeping with the Alan Ball theme of my previous post I saw Towelhead, a film written and directed by Ball, on Sunday.  It was a pretty disturbing experience.  While Towelhead is by no means a great film it’s an extremely powerful look at a young girl facing quagmire that is sex and race in America. 

 

Set during the Gulf War, Towelhead follows the tumultuous, traumatizing sexual awakening of Jasira (played absolutely convincingly by 18-year-old Summer Bishil) a thirteen year old Arab-American girl.  When Jasira’s white mother Gail  (Maria Bello) discovers that her boyfriend has been paying inappropriate attention to Jasira she ships her daughter to Houston to live with her Lebanese father Rifat (Peter Macdissi). 

 

Gail is a childish, self-interested monster of a mother who tells her daughter “this is your fault” as she sends her away and Rifat isn’t much of a parent either.  Cold, wrapped up in himself and repressive he strikes his daughter when she appears at the breakfast table in shorts, locks her out of the house for wearing a tampon.  If that wasn’t bad enough he’s also a hypocrite.  While he does everything in his power to restrict Jasira’s budding sexuality he has no qualms about having his girlfriend over or disappearing to spend the night at her place. 

 

With this sort of desolate, loveless home life it’s inevitable that Jasira is headed for trouble.  Her world is more or less void of joy until she accidentally discovers the pleasures of orgasm while browsing through the girly magazines of a neighbor she baby sits for.  The neighbor, Mr. Vuoso (Aaron Eckhard) is entirely too interested in Jasira’s sexual curiosity and in Jasira herself. 

 

As the film progresses Jasira become more deeply involved with Mr. Vuoso and also starts experimenting with Thomas (Eugene Jones), an African American classmate.  Neither father nor Mr. Vuoso approve of her seeing Thomas.  Both of them believe that going being associated with a black boy will ruin her reputation and lead her to be considered “a slut”.  Thomas himself is an ambiguous figure.  He introduces himself to Jasira by calling her a “sand nigger” though he later apologizes and tells her she shouldn’t let people call her names.  He must realize she’s fragile (because it’s pretty damn obvious) but he’s interested in laid, even bringing condoms and initiating sex when Jasira’s is hiding out at a neighbors after she’s run away from her father’s violent outburst. 

 

The neighbor in question, a pregnant woman named Melina (Toni Collette) and her husband Gil (Matt Letscher) are pretty much the only decent adults in the film (well, Thomas’ parents seem okay but they’re only in one brief scene) .   They’re the only ones looking out for Jasira or offering her any kind of understand or compassion without strings attached.  Interestingly the plot synopsis on IMDB describes Melina as “meddling” but compared to the selfishness of the other adult characters her concern for Jasira is downright refreshing. 

 

In a way one of the weaknesses of Towelhead is the fact that Jasira’s mother and father are such complete failures as parents-- they don’t even seem real.  I worked for five years at a Chemical Dependencies Clinic so I’ve seen any number of self-serving, vain, childish, manipulative, obvious and generally sucky parents but even I had a hard time believing that Gail and Rafit could be as neglectful, cruel, uncaring, and unfair towards their daughter as they were.  Rafit does have his moments but Gail is more or less inhuman.  She might as well be a life-sized cardboard cut-out with “bad mother” printed on her.  I felt like the role was a criminal waste of the talented and intelligent actress Maria Bello.  Also there’s something a little distressing about the fact that Jasira’s rapist is written in a more humane fashion than her mother.  Even though he’s sexually coercing a barely pubescent girl Mr. Vuoso comes across as more fully rounded and sympathetic.  This is a problem I’ve had with Ball’s work before.  I loved American Beauty when I watched it but looking back on it I can’t help thinking that when a man quits his job and regresses to teenage behavior including smoking pot and lusting after high school girls I will generally feel like he, not his wife, is the one out of line.  

 

Despite some serious flaws I do appreciate that Towelhead takes a serious look at the mixed messages faced by young girls growing up in our hyper-sexualized world where on one hand they’re lead to believe that sex appeal is their most valuable asset, the most effective way to get attention and on the other they’re vilified as sluts and held responsible for how other people perceive them and what other people do to them. 

 

Beyond its hot button themes of teenage sexuality and race there are some really fine, insightful moments in Towelhead.  One that I found particularly telling was an interaction between Jasira and Mr. Vuoso’s son Zach who she is babysitting.  He calls her “towelhead, camel jockey, sand nigger” and she hits him.  Later, Mrs. Vuoso stops by with Zach to tell Jasira’s father what happened.  She is outraged that Jasira  would “hit a little child.”   Jasira however stands up for herself and tells what Zack said and her father supports her.  Still later, Mr. Vuoso brings Zack around again to apologize, saying that Zack might have been repeating things he heard at home. 

 

Although most of the films press materials refer to Mr. Vuoso as “bigoted”, we really don’t see that side of him (except for his assumption that Jasira’s father “loves Saddam”) so I found this moment really interesting.  It really shows that the children, Zach and Jasira are both imitating negative things their parents have done believing they were in the privacy of their own homes and their actions would have no outside consequences.  Jasira’s father hits her so she hits Zach.  Zach repeats the racial slurs he had heard from his father.  I’ve read that the film was originally titled Nothing is Private and this really seems to sum up that theme with a delicacy I wish had been more prevent in the film. 

I saw Dark Knight  a couple days ago and was more or less blown away. 

 

I grew up with Batman—watching the 60’s television show, reading the comics.  Characters like Batman, Batgirl, Robin, Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, the Joker, Catwoman, Two-Face, Penguin, the Riddler, and Poison Ivy have been a part of my consciousness for over 30 years.  It’s kind of amazing to me that I can still be so captivated by such a familiar story, that there are still new layers to be reveled.

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A couple of days ago I went to see The Fall, an opulent fantasy/allegory directed by Tarsem Singh.  Tarsem (as he is called) is best known for directing music videos and commercials.  His pervious feature film is The Cell, a 2000 science fiction film starring Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn which received pretty bad reviews and was generally dismissed as being all style and no substance. 

 

I’ve never seen The Cell but I wasn’t expecting much from The Fall.  I went to see it mainly because I’m a fan of Lee Pace.  Pace is best known for his work on the television shows Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies but he’s played a MTF transsexual (The Soldier’s Girl) and In Cold Blood killer Dick Hickcock (Infamous) in Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies)—just the sort of bizarre combination of roles that attracts my attention. 

 

The story of The Fall is fairly straightforward.  It is set at the dawn of the motion picture era it concerns two patients recuperating from falls in a Hollywoodland hospital.  One is a little girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru was is the cutest little thing I’ve ever seen)  who has been working as a fruit picker and broke her arm when she fell from a tree.  The other is Roy (Lee Pace), a stuntman who is suffering from paralysis that may or may not be permanent as the result of a back injury he incurred when he fell from a horse during the shooting of a cowboy movie.  We later learn that his accident may have been a suicide attempt.

 

Roy and Alexandria befriend each other and he begins to tell her a story about a mismatched band of adventurers including an Italian explosives expert, an Indian prince, a masked bandit and Charles Darwin (who wears an amazing multi-color fur coat), and their efforts to stop the evil Governor Odious. 

 

Making the story up as he goes along, incorporating other patients, hospital workers and every little bit of information he has about Alexandria, Roy soon has his audience of one captivated.  From there he starts manipulating her to do things for him, specifically to get him pills so that he can commit suicide (ah, the days when a very tiny child could toddle into a hospital infirmary and make off with a bottle of morphine).

 

The fantasy sequences in The Fall are lavish and ornate, full of vivid colors with an emphasis on the exotic-- Indian, African, Asian and Middle Eastern motifs.  I actually found the exoticism to be a bit much.  To me scenes of frenzied “primitive” drumming and dancing seem a little too close to racial stereotyping.  Or maybe they just reveal a little too much of Tarsem’s roots in music video…  Still, there were some truly gorgeous images, some with sadomasochistic undertones that I responded very strongly to. There’s a scene where Lee Pace is half-conscious and tethered to a post in a vast desert under the beating sun where the camera lingers over scraped cheek and peeling lips that I found  particularly memorable... 

 

While spectacle is the main thrust of The Fall I actually found its content rather affecting to the point where I wish it had been more carefully developed.  The Fall touches on some potentially interesting ideas about the way that stories can be used to both control and to heal.  Early on Roy is very deliberate in creating his story to please Alexandria but as his emotional state deteriorates he seems to lose control of the fantasy.  She is hurt and frightened as he kills off his characters but he can’t seem to stop it any more than he can stop his own pain.  I would have loved to have seen more exploration of this concept of deliberate versus unconscious story telling; however that wasn’t really the film’s focus.  It was, like Across the Universe, more of a dance than a novel, more about motion, space and color than about character, story and ideas.  Still, it almost seemed like there were enough half formed characters, story and ideas that I was sort of disappointed not to see more done with them.

Saturday night, I went to the movies.  Given my obsession with Tim Roth and my love of comic books (not to mention a long time interest in Ed Norton’s work) it probably seems like I’d want to see The Incredible Hulk but I honestly don’t have any desire to see it.  On the other hand I was very excited to see Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace.  Kalin directed Swoon, one of my favorite movies, in 1992 but hasn’t done a full length film since then so in my world the opening of Savage Grace was a big deal. 

 

Like Swoon, which dealt with the Leopold and Loeb murder, Savage Grace is based on an actual case—the 1972 murder of socialite Barbara Baekeland by her son Tony.  Barbara (Julianne Moore) is married to Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane) whose family earned a fortune from the invention of bakelite plastics.  Their marriage is deeply troubled.  Brooks is discontented with the sort of pretentious, upper-crust social circles that Barbara obsessively courts.  From the beginning, Barbara seems dangerously unstable or even mentally ill.  She puts a great deal of work into being accepted by high society then sabotages her own efforts with inappropriate outbursts—in one scene she begins as a doting hostess and ends up denouncing her guests. 

 

Barbara’s behavior alarms and exasperates her husband but Barbara creates an unwavering and worshipful ally in her son Tony (played by Eddie Redmayne as an adult).  Which works very well when Tony is a precocious child but gets much more complicated when Tony becomes a sexually confused adult and Barbara and Brooks’ marriage dissolves. 

 

It’s quite an amazing little film, darkly comic and profoundly disturbing.  Anyone who’s read my fiction knows I have a sort of twisted fascination with the idea of incest as a trope for the way family members use and misuse each other.  Savage Grace brought these ideas chillingly to life.  Barbara refuses to allow the appropriate boundaries between herself and her son and a horrible interdependence grows between them that leads first to the scariest threesome on film (suddenly the brother and sister in The Dreamers seem vaguely wholesome) to an outright sexual act between mother and son that was frankly, shocking (people in the theater, including me, we literally gasping).  I knew there was incest in the film but by the time Barbara mounts her son he seems so emotionally damaged that it seems like an act of deliberately, selfish and nearly violent cruelty on her part. 

 

Really chilling, and yet despite all the implicit emotional violence part of me thought it was a really cool scene in the sense that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman being that aggressive or that much in charge during a sex scene before, at least not in an American film.  It’s sort of a shame (but not really a surprise) that the rare sexually dominate woman (or femme seme as I like to say) is a bit of a monster.

I’ve developed something of a passion for the manga of Ai Yazawa, mostly Nana (I’ve devoured the first eight volumes) and also Paradise Kiss (which I’ve read the first volume of). 

 

Her series Nana was recommended to me based on a bit of Princess Tutu yuri I’d written and right before I lost my second job at Biff’s office I decided to take a chance and secured copies of the first eight volumes of the series from e-bay.  A rather significant risk, I might have hated the series, but as luck would have it Nana turns out to be one of the better manga series I’ve ever read. 

 

Basically it’s about two very different 20-year-old women, both named Nana who come to Tokyo, meet and whose lives become increasingly intertwined.   No science-fiction or supernatural elements, just a pair of girls trying to build their lives and become themselves. 

 

Nana Komatsu is an exuberant but essentially aimless young woman.  Good hearted but clueless she allows herself to drift through life in the wake of whoever she happens to be in love with.  When her friends, including her boyfriend, move to Tokyo to attend art school, she follows them.  On the train to the city she meets the other Nana, Nana Osaki.

 

Nana Osaki is a punk rock singer with very definite goals.  Her previous band, Blast, was a local success in the small city she is from but that ended when their bassist Ren left to join the major label band Trapnest.  Ren was also Nana’s lover and he asked her to come with him but she declined as it would have meant being relegated to “rock star’s girlfriend.”  Their affair was put on hold and in Tokyo, Nana O is determined to become a success at least equal to Ren, with her new band.    

 

Nano O is guarded as Nana K is open, sharing little about her painful childhood or her personal life.  Yet her music has the ability to move people deeply.  Through her music, she seems to speak for them. 

 

While there’s some cutesy stuff, overall Nana is much more adult- as in grown-up, than most manga I’ve read.  Also it’s more novelistic, things seem to develop, grow and deepen with each installment. 

 

Also it has a sensibility I love. 

 

While so much manga seems to focus on students in school uniforms who aspire to the student council, Yazawa’s characters are hip bohemians, artist and musicians in Nana, an enclave of edgy fashion designers in Paradise Kiss.   They shop at thrift stores and vintage shops and garner inspiration from the Sex Pistols and Velvet Goldmine- definitely my kind of scene.  In a way Nana reminds me somewhat painfully of my college years, especially Nana K’s desire to be included in Nana O’s circle of punk musicians.  

 

Though I’m quite late to the party, I’ve started watching the BBC series Torchwood.  I polished off the first season on DVD and am two episodes into season 2 via downloads.  Overall I like it quite a bit.  Season One was fairly uneven.  There were some good episodes but some truly baffling suspensions of logic were required (I’m sorry, but any solution that involves reading the complete works of Emily Dickinson aloud is not acceptable).   Still, it’s amazing what you can forgive of a show that makes just about everybody in its entire cast more or less bisexual.    

 

And when I say everyone I mean everyone.  The leader of Torchwood (an alien hunting organization that’s sort of the UK equivalent to Men In Black) Captain Jack Harkness  openly admits to lovers of both sexes, is sexually involved with a member of his team but still manages to have a kind of “unresolved sexual tension” thing going with Gwen.  In addition to holding up her part of the UST with Jack, Gwen has a boyfriend and has an affair with the team’s medic Owen.  This doesn’t stop her from kissing a woman processed by an alien in the second episode of the show.  Computer expert Toshiko, who seems to have a crush on Owen has an affair with an alien who is female in human form.    An episode is devoted to another team member, Ianto’s efforts to resurrect his girlfriend but it’s gradually revealed in future episodes that he’s become involved with Jack.  Even Owen, a compulsive womanizer and seemingly the straightest member of Torchwood makes out with a guy in the series premiere and during an apocalyptic moment suggests that both Ianto and Toshiko have end of the world sex with him. 

 

I sort of love this kind of stuff. 

 

Season One had a lot of promise which I hope Season Two will deliver on.  It definitely seemed to be off to a good start in the first episode (appropriately titled “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” when Spike (yes, that Spike—Buffy Spike) shows up looking for Jack to be his Drusilla.  Okay, it’s not Spike.  His name is Captain John Hart.  He’s brunette and American.  And he’s not a vampire, he’s some sort of time agent thing that I’d know about if I’d actually watched Dr. Who before watching the spin-off but basically it’s Spike engaging in violent making out with a really cute (if full of himself) guy and in my book, that is pretty stunning. 

 

On the literary front I just finished reading Sarah Water’s novel Fingersmith.  It’s the third novel I’ve read by Waters (I admit it, I have a thing for Victorian lesbians).  The others were Tipping the Velvet (my favorite) and Affinity.   

 

I’d seen a BBC adaptation of Fingersmith a couple of years ago so I knew the basic outlines of the plot, which is probably a good thing.  I’m less concerned with being surprised than I am with knowing what’s going on and Fingersmith is full of the sort of twists and turns and reversals that often times confuse the hell out of me.  Knowing where the story was going freed me up to focus on the characters, the wonderful period dialogue and the rich atmosphere that Water’s evokes.  This atmosphere is by turns sensual and sickening.  Water has a way of making you smell the 19^th century and what with chamberpots and close rooms on rainy nights reeking of dog and unwashed bodies it doesn’t always smell good. 

 

In Fingersmith, Waters seems to deliberately set out to write a sort of post-modern  Dickensonian novel brimming over with melodramatic contrivances such as switched babies, ghastly uncles, and dastardly plots as well as expanding Dickens social themes to include issues of gender and sexuality as well as wealth and class. 

 

Another bit of post-modern pseudo-Victoriana I’ve indulged in lately is Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige, about a pair of rival illusionists.  This was my second viewing of The Prestige.  I have to admit my first left me rather baffled.  As I said, I’m not so good a following plots and The Prestige is extremely complicated, a puzzle of a movie in much the same way Nolan’s Memento was.

 

The film’s complexity is encapsulated by its framing device—much of the movie concerns a man reading another man’s diary about reading his own diary.  Follow?  Of course both diaries were intended to be read and are full of deliberate misinformation.  Appropriate for a film that’s central themes are doubles, the creation of illusion and how things are not what they seem to be.  I definitely got much more out of the Prestige by seeing it a second time and I’d like to watch it again just to clear up some details I didn’t really follow.  Also having watched it, I’d rather like to see Nolan’s contribution to the Batman mythology.  I’ve been intensely interested in Batman as a sort of masculine   archetype since I was a teenager but somehow I never got around to seeing Batman Begins. 

On Tuesday I went to see the movie Stop-Loss, a drama about Iraq war vets who return home believing their service has ended only to learn that under the militaries stop-loss policy they’re going to be sent back.  Stop-Loss is the first film that openly lesbian director Kimberly Peirce has made since Boys Don’t Cry back in 1999.  One of the reasons I really wanted to see this movie is because a couple of years ago I had the opportunity to see Peirce speak (she has Chicago roots, she’s a University of Chicago alumni) and she was talking about the struggle she was in with the studios to make the film she wanted—a movie about war and returning veterans drawing from her younger brothers experiences in Iraq and 70’s films on similar themes like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. 

 

I’m glad she was finally able to make her movie and I think Kimberly Peirce is the ideal choice to make a movie of this kind, maybe because she isn’t a Hollywood insider.   She has a lot of respect for her soldier characters; she doesn’t denigrate them for their lack of education and their very traditional aspirations and that makes their love of their Texas home town seem real even to someone like me who’s very alienated from small town values.  Peirce doesn’t glamorize or sentimentalize this world, she just let’s us see it through her characters eyes. 

 

She did this very effectively in Boys Don’t Cry as well.  When I first read about the life and death of female to male trans-person Brandon Teena in the Village Voice I remember thinking “He should have gotten the fuck out of Nebraska, gone to San Fran or NYC.”  Watching Boys Don’t Cry, this didn’t really seem like an option.  Brandon didn’t want to escape Nebraska, he wanted to belong there.  It was sometimes exciting, sometimes beautiful, it was home.  It was where he died but it was also where he found a girl who accepted him and loved him.  Peirce never vilified Brandon’s world, didn’t turn it into a Texas Chainsaw Massacre vision of homophobic hell.  There were good people in it and bad.  

 

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit about the cultural divide in America lately because of all the controversy surrounding the statement Barack Obama made regarding Pennsylvania primary voters about bitter people clinging to God and guns.  I have to admit when I heard it I didn’t think it was at all offensive or questionable, I thought it was true.  Yet watching Stop-Loss I was able to suspend judgment, to watch and feel for characters that don’t see the war in Iraq the way I do, who believe in Tody Keith songs and guns and the military.  I think this is quite an accomplishment on Kimberly Peirce’s part that she can make someone with a lousy elitist attitude like mine inhabit the world of these characters.  In times like these its’ critically important to have artists who can serve as a bridge between liberal and conservative, red and blue, urban and suburban (does rural America even exist any more?  I think of the area around my hometown, how acres and acres of farmland turned to acres and acres of used car lots, gas stations and fast food restaurants as I grew up).   

 

Though its characters honestly believe in “killing terrorists over there so we don’t have to kill them here” Stop-Loss is very much an anti-war film and it pulls no punches in showing the damage war does to the men who fight it and the ways in which the very people who support the action in Iraq are being screwed over by it.  The scenes of fighting set in Iraq are pretty harrowing and really give a sense of just what urban guerilla warfare involves—it involves driving (and sometimes shooting) on city streets with pedestrians, bicyclists and local traffic as well as people on sidewalks.  It involves combatants running into civilian apartment building.  It’s not just a matter of taking out the enemy but of trying not to take out the neighborhood and of course not to get killed in the process.  Both the psychological and physical toll the war takes on soldiers is also unflinchingly portrayed.  We see a solider named Rodriguez wounded early on and references are made to him thought out the film but it’s very shocking when we finally see him, blinded, scarred by shrapnel, minus an arm and a leg, during a sequence set at a VA hospital.   On the emotional side, both of the films main characters, Brandon (Ryan Philleppe) and Steve (Channing Tatum) as well as their friend Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) have been seriously impacted by their experiences in Iraq.  All of them display volatile behavior and abuse, both Brandon and Steve have flashbacks to combat, and neither Steve nor Tommy can sustain a relationship with their partners.    It’s no wonder that the stop-loss policy, which threatens to send Brandon back after everything he’s been through, seems so consummately unfair. 

 

Unfortunately, while Stop-Loss has moments that are powerful and thought provoking overall it just didn’t seem to come together for me.  It sort of meandered towards the middle and I really felt there was something missing in the character trajectory of Tommy.  He really felt more like a plot contrivance than an organic part of the story.  Still, I’m glad Peirce was finally able to make the film though I can’t help wondering if innovative directors would fare better outside the studio system entirely.  I guess it’s the cultural question all over again.  Because Stop-Loss was made through a studio it has wider distribution, it’ll show at multiplexes instead of art house theaters.  It might actually show outside of major cities.  Whether or not anyone in these markets will opt to see an anti-war film directed by a gay woman is up for grabs but it’s good that they’re given the option.  Given the amount of time I spent in living in rural upstate New York I can appreciate that Peirce wants to reach beyond what would be considered the target audience of educated, urban liberals and actually have this picture seen by the people it’s most relevant to.

One of the advantages of living in a major city—I get to see every obscure ass film Tim Roth appears in the theaters as soon as it’s released. 

 

Yesterday I went to see Funny Games.  It’s directed by Austrian Michael Haneke, best know for controversial films such as The Piano Teacher (2001) and Cache (2005).  Funny Games is rather peculiar in that it is a shot-by-shot English language remake of a film of the same title that Haneke made in 1997.

( cut for spoilers and discussion of violence. )

Last night I watched (for the second time) Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Peeping Tom tells the story of Mark (Carl Boehm), a shy filmmaker who commits a series of gristly murders, filming his victims as they die. Made in 1960, the film pre-dates Hitchcock’s Psycho and (for better or for worse) can be seen as one of the first slasher/serial killer movies. While very controversial in its day, Peeping Tom would probably get a PG rating today-- it’s more psychological than gore-iffic—and in my mind more effective than many of the more graphic films that followed it. One of the things I found most interesting about Peeping Tom is the way it captures the very fine line between art and pathology.

The killer, Mark, has a complex relationship the camera. As a child, his psychologist father filmed him constantly and subjected him to “scientific experiments”, essentially abuse, to provide him with data on his studies of fear on the nervous system. I found myself fascinated by a scene where Mark shows his downstairs neighbor, Helen, the films his father made of him as a child. Watching the footage of the little boy being tormented by bright lights and a lizard thrown in his bed, Helen becomes increasingly confused and anxious. At which point Mark begins to film her. It’s an odd mirror within a mirror moment where he’s using her reaction to his trauma to fuel his compulsive “art”.

In a way it reminded me of what I do as a writer. I feel like my stories and even my journaling involves dredging up my worst and most painful experiences (in my fiction, these are often metaphorical rather than literal, exaggerated and disguised versions of my experiences) and seeing how people respond to them.

I am, in my personal life very shy but I’ve always felt that my writing is to an extent fueled by exhibitionistic tendencies. I often quote Anne Sexton’s poem Mercy for the Greedy where she writes “My friend, my friend, I was born doing reference work in sin and born confessing it. This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.” Because I was raised to believe that there is something wrong with seeking attention, I feel a little ashamed about writing. It always felt like a transgressive act to me. I started writing at 14 but I was a college student before I really dared to show my writing to others. Even today, at 36, I have very mixed feelings about my art. I’ve worked very hard to be able to write freely about things that I would rather keep to myself, including aspects of my sexuality and painful experiences. Still, I can’t help but wonder if, like Mark, by engaging these dangerous parts of myself I’m feeding them, giving them power. 

I’ve always thought that there were, simultaneously, two Americas.  One is the dream of high ideals, liberty, justice, freedom and compassion.  The other is the monster that consumes its share and everyone else’s and butchers anyone who stands in its way.  I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s film There Will Be Blood on Monday and it does an amazing job of capturing the cruelty and compulsions that went into creating America’s monster side. 

 

There Will Be Blood begins just before the turn of the century and follows the career of oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) but to the late 1920’s.  With his young son H.W. beside him Daniel lauds family and plain-speaking while swindling communities of their land and oil rights.

( cut for spoilers (though I don't reveal everything) )