I am no expert on H. P. Lovecraft, so I don’t know if he’d be amused by this. But this does now make me think of some interesting directions a possible Toy Story 3 could take.
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Two items of surpassing niftiness (it’s my blog, I can make up any word I want) appeared at AICN today. First is a trailer for the newly-restored version of the SF classic Metropolis, a film that established tropes which influenced many a filmmaker (not the least of which is George Lucas). It appears that just about every minute of previously-missing footage from Metropolis that can be found, has been found and that this new version is as close as we are ever going to get to the original version seen in 1927. While I won’t be able to see the new version until a DVD is issued (and I get a DVD player), it’s still exciting to note the wonderful treatment a cinematic SF classic has received. (Roger Ebert also wrote about this new Metropolis restoration last week. Ebert is a long-time champion of restoration of classic films, so many of which are in horrible shape due to neglect of the prints and negatives. I wish he’d become more musically aware, though, and bring his passion to bear on filmscore restoration.)
The other goodie on AICN today is also a film trailer, the first glance I’ve had of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. My God, I can’t wait for this film. If you, dear Reader, are one of those people who will only go see an animated film if it bears the “Disney” imprint, go see this one! (It’s being distributed by Disney, but that didn’t help Princess Mononoke two years ago.) Check out the trailer. It’s breathtaking, and that’s saying something for an image the size of a business-card on my monitor.
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The alternative comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug appears weekly in Artvoice, Buffalo’s alt-press paper. As a political commentary it’s generally not quite as good as This Modern World, but sometimes it’s very good. Case in point: this week’s parody of Spider-man, “The Amazing George W.”. I found this hilarious.
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I’m really not terribly excited about Star Trek Nemesis. Rick Berman and company did a lot of good things in their day, but I think the current regime in charge of Trek has pretty much run out of ideas. (I have not seen a single episode of Enterprise, so I can’t comment on that; it’s only on cable in Buffalo and we don’t have cable.) From what I’ve read of the Nemesis storyline, it seems like a rehash of a lot of earlier Trek stories (with a lot cribbed from The Wrath of Khan). I know that the story focuses on Data’s long-standing “quest” to become more human; my problem there is that sometimes quests are achieved without our knowing it. Data reached a point of “closure” in First Contact, and I really don’t think there’s any point in keeping it going. Likewise, I’m not all that interested in the ongoing tribulations of the Romulan Empire. I’d much rather see a Trek film that actually explores strange new worlds and seeks out new life and new civilizations. If this is to be the last voyage for the Next Generation crew, why not show them actually, well, boldly going where no one has gone before?
(The film was also to feature a brief cameo by Wil Wheaton as a grown-up Wesley Crusher; I suppose he finally wrapped up his Grand Tour of the Mysteries of the Universe with that “Traveler” guy. But, as reported on WWDN, the scene in question has been cut. So Wesley won’t save the day one last time; ah, well….)
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In the “Hell hath no fury” department, check out Peter Gammons‘s take on the looming baseball strike. If MLB does have a work stoppage, I will officially set baseball aside. The owners and the players have demonstrated that they collectively do not care about the game, but only about their particular slice of the pie and their control over the knife that’s dividing the rest of the pie. A pox on baseball, and all of their houses.
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Barely a week after I proclaimed On Her Majesty’s Secret Service the best Bond film ever made, its director, Peter Hunt, has died. Hunt was also a prominent film editor, working on all of the Bond films of the 1960s along with many other films. I read of his passing via AICN. Hunt’s filmography can be found here.
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Last week I saw M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, Signs. I will now review it in SPOILER-HEAVY fashion. I repeat: There WILL be SPOILERS. I shall make no effort to conceal any plot element of Signs that I think is germane to my opinion of the film. Got it? OK.
And for those who are still squeamish, I will include some blank space so as to require scrolling down to get to the actual review.
That should be enough. From here on out, if you read this and you haven’t seen the movie yet and you read something that you might not want to know prior to seeing it, I accept no responsibility.
Signs is, first and foremost, a very good film. Seeing it, I kept thinking: “This is how The X-Files used to be, back in its early seasons, before it became a Franchise for FOX.” Or, even better, this is how Millennium was at its best: not merely scary but also thought-provoking, a meditation not just on What Is Out There Waiting For Us, not just on Things That Go Bump In The Night, but on what purpose there may be to everything. It seems to me that horror is probably the genre most suited to meditations on the problem of evil: Why would a good God allow so much Evil in his own universe? Of course, my own personal thoughts on this subject are not the focus of this article. Suffice it to say, Shyamalan’s answer isn’t totally satisfactory; in fact, in some ways I find it incredibly faulty. Even at the end, when things have played out the way they were supposed to and faith has been restored where before there was none, it still seems to me a bit capricious, a bit of whimsical action on the part of God. If God could set things up so that everything leans toward the outcome that Mel Gibson’s son doesn’t die, including his wife’s dying words which at first seem so arbitrary as to send Gibson into a tailspin away from his faith but eventually turn out to be the key to everything, then why can’t God set things up so that Gibson’s beloved wife doesn’t die in the first place? Shyamalan’s film attempts to answer the question that bedeviled Job, but in the end I don’t think he provides an answer at all, much less a satisfying one. Gibson seems to return to faith well before the key event in the film that is supposed to make it all possible. Is this a fault with the film? Not really. I rather suspect that it’s a fault with the entire question of evil in the first place. I simply am not sure that there is an answer that satisfies all formulations.
So I don’t think that Signs really works as a theological statement, but thankfully that’s not really the level that I think it should be evaluated upon. In fact, in this day and age one almost gets positive yardage just for being willing to ask these questions in the first place. Signs is a horror film, first and foremost; and as such, it’s probably the most effective one I have ever seen.
Much was made about the role of silence in Shyamalan’s earlier films. (Actually, this seems true of The Sixth Sense; I never saw Unbreakable, however.) This is even more true this time out. There are long passages of this film where nothing more can be heard than the breathing of the characters, and Shyamalan likes to stretch out his silences. We know that the silence will be broken, and probably by something calculated to make us jump. Shyamalan does make us jump, but he does so in unexpected ways. The “jump” moments happen not just when characters are walking slowly through an area in which they are terrified to be, but during other moments when the “jump” moment can slip in under our radar. An early example involves a well-timed bark and snarl by a dog, during a scene where two characters are talking in fairly mundane fashion. It’s not something jumping out at us in the midst of silence, backed by a fierce chord in the soundtrack; instead, we jump because it’s so unexpected at that particular moment.
This careful use of unexpected moments, woven throughout the film, is how Shyamalan generates so much suspense. There is a scene where what may (or may not) be an alien is locked behind a door, and Mel Gibson picks up a butcher knife – not to use it as a weapon, but as a mirror so he can look under the door and catch a glimpse of whatever is behind the door. The film is full of unexpected moments like that, and they add to the suspense and the overall feeling of fear. He also uses humor at odd moments to defuse our fear, so that he can pop one of his unexpected moments at us again. There are some very funny moments in the film, some of them occurring during moments of high tension. The fact that they occur during moments of tension does not defuse the tension one whit, but somehow elevates it.
More interesting is the way almost nothing in Shyamalan’s script is wasted. Nearly every single detail in the screenplay has some bearing on the outcome, even moments that in other films are generally used as “filler” or throw-away moments designed only to give us more information on a character. Gibson’s brother (Joaquin Phoenix), for example, is a failed baseball player. This seems only to explain why he is so unfocused in his life, and why he has hung around his brother’s farm for so long – until the film’s climactic scene, when the nature of his baseball failure, coupled with the formerly inexplicable last words of Gibson’s wife (“Swing away”), come together in startling fashion. Other details are easily overlooked: early on, we barely notice that Gibson chooses to call his human doctor rather than the vet for the family’s ailing dog; only later on do we realize that he has a very real reason for not wishing to involve the local vet. Shyamalan’s theme in Signs is the conflict between two worldviews: that there are no coincidences, and that everything is a coincidence. Since he comes down on the side that there are no coincidences, the structure of his screenplay – such that there are, in fact, no coincidences in his story – is all the more remarkable.
Signs works as a horror film. It is less than plausible from the standpoint of science fiction: how can the aliens fly across interstellar space but then be thwarted by wooden doors? if water is literally a corrosive poison to them, why would the aliens come to a planet that is three-quarters covered in the stuff? Questions like these, however, should not be asked. Nothing about the aliens is ever explained, and that is actually a strength, because we never know anything that the family in the film cannot also know. Again, the tension is heightened. I’ve rarely seen a film that displays as much calculation in every facet of its story and visuals as Signs. This film is a bravura performance by M. Night Shyamalan.
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I have a fairly high threshold for things that are creepy and skin-crawling. This site, however, very nearly exceeds even my limit. There can now be no doubt: the King of Pop is the single strangest human being on the planet.
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), Millennium. (Image links to The Millennial Abyss, a fine fan site for the show.)
This is one of my favorite television series ever. It was the second series from Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, and it debuted to great fanfare in 1996 and had good ratings initially; however, over time its ratings dropped as the show’s tone never varied much from the dark and grim atmosphere of the early episodes. The show centered on Frank Black, a criminal investigator who had a psychic ability to see into the minds of the killers he tracked. As he notably said in the pilot episode, “It’s my gift….it’s my curse.” Thus Frank was torn in two directions, between delving into the darkest parts of the world in which we live and protecting his family from the darkness. Lance Henriksen played Frank Black with immense gravity, creating a character who was absolutely the moral center of everything that went on around him. Even now, three years after the show’s cancellation, Henriksen’s accomplishment on Milennium amazes me.
The general impression of the first season was that the show basically trotted out a “Serial Killer of the Week”, and was thus a fairly hard sell. That criticism was partially accurate, but it downplays the general high quality of those first-season shows. In the second season of Millennium, the subject matter was expanded a bit to include a mix of serial killers, secret societies, Christian mysticism, and Biblical prophecy. Many fans of the series felt that Year Two was the show’s best, and I agree; this was when Millennium displayed the most interesting storytelling, with excitement and emotional depth. The standout episode, for me, was the amazing “Midnight of the Century”, in which Frank Black must come to terms with his mother’s death in his childhood, through ghostly visits and visions. The second season was managed by executive producers Glen Morgan and James Wong, who were also responsible for some of the more memorable early episodes of The X-Files.
The third season of Millennium, though, was a seriously mixed bag that eventually fell apart completely. Part of the problem was the preceding season, which had ended with events of near apocalyptic horror; it is possible that there really was no way for the show to go on after that and remain convincing. Also, Morgan and Wong left for other pastures, and the writing that replaced them was generally nowhere near the quality of the first two seasons. The stand-alone “serial killer” episodes of the third season were not particularly well written; even worse, the “mytharc” episodes brought in all manner of X-Files-style conspiracies, ignored previously established continuity, turned former ally characters into villains with no justification (most egregiously, Terry O’Quinn’s character of Peter Watts, a wonderful character from the first two seasons who became a Cigarette-Smoking-Man-style caricature in the third season), and generally foundered. Frank’s wife, who had died at the end of Season Two, was replaced by Emma Hollis (Klea Scott), a new FBI partner for Frank who was never sharply drawn as a character at all. By the time Season Three was half-done, it was clear that the show would not be back for a fourth, and Chris Carter took quite a bit of heat from fans for seemingly abandoning a show that had had so much promise and had reached such heights during its first two years. Still, Season Three had some good moments, particularly a Christmas episode called “Omerta”. Nevertheless, I remember Millennium almost solely on the basis of the first two seasons — much like fans of the original Star Trek series, who will waste little time telling you how bad their Season Three was.
It was Millennium, coupled with The X-Files, that led to my re-discovery of the horror genre. For that alone I am forever in its debt.
This is who we are.
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A few discussions have taken place lately — here and here — about the things that Stephen King says about plotting in his book, On Writing. Basically, King is very much against the use of outlines and making careful determinations of each event, as it is to happen, in his works prior to writing them. His approach is more spontaneous, and I was thrilled when I read it, because it mirrors mine quite nicely.
I don’t generate outlines of my plot prior to writing a story, nor do I write character sketches of the main players. I start with one thing: a situation. This can take many forms, but generally it’s a one-sentence statement of the fix that my main character either is in at the beginning of the story or that (s)he will get into early on in the story. Here are a few examples of situations I’ve used:
:: A book from the library happens to contain a note written by a woman who was murdered fifty years ago.
:: A pen collector’s latest pen is haunted.
:: The new beer that a bartender has just started carrying is magical, with some very strange effects on the bar’s patrons.
Now, there is a ton of leeway there for exploration, and the first thing that I have to establish is the main character. Basically, the question I ask myself is, “Now, what kind of person would get him/herself into this situation?” So, I decide who finds the note in the book (a lonely artist who has lost his inspiration), who is that pen-collector (an apostate Jew who fancies himself a writer but who can never finish a single work), and who owns the bar (a woman in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania). This isn’t to say that these situations couldn’t happen to someone else; in fact, they most definitely could — these are merely the people who, in my mind, have ended up thus. And then, once I know Who has What Problem, I go from there, pretty much letting my characters determine their own actions. At least, that’s how it feels to me. In each of my stories, I have at some point felt a certain bit of surprise at one or more junctures along the way — and that’s me, the writer, being surprised. I love those surprises, and they cropped up even when I was using outlines. Then, I would end up feeling slightly resentful either of the surprise, because to follow it meant shelving The Outline, or of The Outline itself — because the surprise had just revealed it to be at least partially bogus. Thus, I stopped outlining altogether, except for a single project of mine — a lengthy bit of self-indulgent Star Wars fanfic that I only work on very sporadically, and thus I find an outline helpful in knowing just what was going on when I stopped last time. Once I have my situation and my protagonist, I start writing with the protagonist, get him/her into the mess, and then watch him/her try to get out. As often as not, I will know the ending in advance; but even when I do know the ending, somehow it always turns out quite unlike what I had known would happen.
Now, this approach sometimes leads me to wrong turns. I started three drafts of the “pen-collector” story before I realized where I kept going wrong and subsequently finished it, and just this week I completely restarted the bartender story after I realized that I began it at the wrong point and had some of the events wrongly sequenced. Stopping and starting over, beginning drafts with no assurance that they will be finished, and sometimes having to shelve works for a while until I figure out what went wrong: these are all part-and-parcel of my writing process, a process which works for me and which I find enjoyable — especially during those Eureka! moments of realization, when I recognize the correct resolution to an outstanding problem and, implementing that solution, have the rest of the story write itself. This isn’t to say that this process will appeal to all other writers; far from it. To some writers, the approach I’ve described above is anathema. They look at this and say, “Good God, man! How can you stand to start a story and not know if that’s the correct starting point? and how can you possibly write the beginning and middle of a story if you don’t know how it ends?” To those authors I shrug and say, “Good God, man! How can you stand to just knock off the next part of the outline each time you sit down to write? and how can you resist it when a plot development that’s not in the outline but would totally rock pops into your head?” Both of us would answer the same way:
“Well, it works.”
That it does. So if Stephen King wants to start a novel with nothing more than the kernel “A teenager named Carrie, whom everyone hates, turns out to have psychokinetic powers”, and if J. K. Rowling wants to write the last chapter of Harry Potter, Book VII before she’s even finished Book V and started Books VI and VII, well, bully for both of them.