Today's installment: Batman Begins, directed by Christopher Nolan. Shhhh, don't tell anybody we talked.

I unloaded about this movie on a message board right after I saw it. (I barely saw the whole thing--I came as close to walking out on it as I have on any movie since The Thin Red Line. I've since mellowed about it somewhat--the acting was terrific, and I appreciate the characterization of Batman as someone to be scared of--but they made such a hash out of virtually everything else that I've sort of de-mellowed and come to really resent the movie again.) Here's my litany:

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Rutger Hauer to Morgan Freeman: "Go get all those papers and disks and data and put them on my desk right now. Also, you're fired." Because THAT makes sense.

I also LOVED how Alfred's FIRST GUESS about what Master Bruce was talking about in terms of becoming a "terrifying symbol" against crime was that he was going to adopt a second persona. Because that would have totally been my first instinct too. I mean, doesn't everybody assume that people who go missing for seven years and end up being broken out of a Himalayan prison by a death cult then come back and start talking about how they're going to strike terror into the hearts of their enemies want to dress up in a costume and fight crime?

Haphazard, murkily edited fight scenes with drearily boring fight choreography. This is the era of Kill Bill, House of Flying Daggers, The Matrix--if you're going to make a big deal out of your protagonist's martial-arts training, at least make it look impressive.

Can we please have ONE comic book movie that doesn't hinge on some big, dopey, nebulously powered sci-fi device that's going to destroy the city? X-Men, Spider-Man 2, now this--enough.

Scarecrow, one of the film's two major villains, was dispatched by a supporting character simply by shooting him in the face with a taser. He then gets carried off screen on a spooked horse. Wow, what a climax.

Speaking of boring and pointless Scarecrow scenes, his first confrontation with Batman lasted approximately 5 seconds before Batman got his ass handed to him. By a psychiatrist who looks like he weighs about 98 pounds.

Also, Batman's costume is bulletproof and can withstand direct electrical currents, but it burns like polyester.

Batman's cowl and mask are really dopey looking. The ears are too small and curve inward—they're not intimidating. The mask curves down too low on his face and makes his chin look fat.

God knows I love Christian Bale but except for the scene where he's interrogating the crooked cop, his Batman voice was awful, like the world's worst Clint Eastwood impersonator.

Scenes just collide one on top of the other with no through line, no sense of transition, seemingly no logic. Characters are introduced with no build-up and no sense of pacing or timing. Bam! It's Morgan Freeman! Bam! It's Dr. Jonathan Crane! Bam! It's Liam Neeson!

Katie Holmes supposedly ingests a fatal dose of fear toxin, yet she's still coherent enough to listen to Batman's calming instructions as he drives her around town.

That was the most boring car chase scene ever, btw. Nothing at stake—for all the jive about how Katie Holmes was gonna die, she seemed fine, no more freaked out than any normal person would be if a man in a Bat costume was driving them through the downtown of a major city at 200mph with a squad of cops chasing them)—no interesting or genuinely evil antagonists, just a bunch of thoroughly outclassed cops.

For someone who (in this version at least) is completely pathological about all crime, Batman sure doesn't mind causing millions of dollars in property damage, does he?

"Not saving someone" and "killing someone," in the circumstances shown in the film, are the exact same thing. That's a truly retarded bit of fanboy morality.

"I'm not an executioner. Therefore I'm going to burn down your monastery, killing you, dozens of your henchmen, and most likely the very criminal I'm currently refusing to execute."

"Hello, I'm a random employee of the water system, introduced during the climax of the movie simply to explain what's going on, because I guess it's impossible to have Morgan Freeman serve this function for some reason. Anyway, if that pressure-raising device that's currently following the monorail above the water main gets back to this central processing plant in which I am speaking, the whole system will blow! Everybody in the audience get that? No? Okay, I'll repeated it two minutes later!"

Not only did Batman not stop the Scarecrow, leaving it to a supporting player, he didn't stop the subway either—he left that to another supporting player, Jim Gordon. I don't know why it's so hard for filmmakers to realize that the big climax of your movie should feature YOUR HEROES TAKING AN ACTIVE ROLE IN BRINGING THINGS TO THAT CLIMAX AND SOLVING THE CLIMACTIC PROBLEM. Ahem, Wachowski Brothers in The Matrix Revolutions, ahem ahem.

I'm just wondering if anyone else picked up on the fact that the theme of the film was fear? Because I don't think they made it clear enough when EVEN BEFORE THEY INTRODUCED THE FREAKING SCARECROW they used the word fear or afraid or scared or terror or some variation thereof about six dozen times. Yes, that's part of what Batman's about, but it's not ALL he's about. Give it a goddamn rest already with the fear.

ANYONE who complained about stiff dialogue in the Star Wars prequels but didn't complain about it here should have their Complaining License revoked. At least in the SW prequels it made some sort of sense—it was all in this sort of faux-Shakesperean milieu. Here, on the other hand, the filmmakers brag and brag about how real-world this version of Batman is, and they're all speaking in the most unbelievably wooden shitty hackwork Batman-comic-from-1993 self-serious fashion imaginable. "How long are you planning on staying in Gotham, Master Bruce?" "As long as it takes. I want my enemies to feel my dread." Good Lord. Rachel's constant little speeches--"The good people do nothing, blah blah blah"--are almost unlistenably bad. And don't even get me started on Thomas Wayne's Basil Exposition imitation on the monorail into the city.

There's no theme music. WTF? How can you have a Batman movie with no theme music?

This is difficult to articulate, but every character seems to display a totally unearned level of familiarity with every other character. Not thirty seconds after Bruce is introduced to the concept that Falcone runs the city, he's sitting across from Falcone facing him down, and Falcone knows exactly who he is and is lecturing him on his psychological shortcomings. Alfred has seen Bruce for all of a few hours in seven years and he's instantly simpatico with Bruce's desire to become a costumed vigilante. About a minute after he meets Ducard he's ready to climb the Himalayas to meet a total stranger. This is such unbelievably lazy writing.

Apparently two minutes is enough time for every last socialite to clear out of Wayne Manor, for their limo drivers to pull into the driveway and pick them up, and for them to get completely clear of the grounds before Ra's al-Ghul's thugs burn it down.

Holy moses did the jokes seem out of place and out of character! "Excuse me," he says to the criminally insane inmates as he blasts a hole out of their cell and into the streets? Argh. Lines like that worked in the first movie, but not here.

Not to mention the fact that Batman essentially does what Ra's and the Scarecrow do later on, which is let inmates out of Arkham Asylum.

Alfred's near tears when he discovers that Bruce wants to tear down Wayne Manor, but then later when it actually gets destroyed he's all "ah, no big whoop."

"Your nice personality is just a mask. The man I loved never came back, Bruce, and I will only love you if that changes. So now let's hold hands while I tell you how proud I am of you. Because that makes sense."

The only character with any emotional depth is the guy who killed the Waynes, who at his parole hearing seems genuinely contrite, and therefore calls into question the notion, drilled home again and again, that compassion for criminals is a weakness. Though given the rest of the film that was probably a mistake on the filmmakers' part rather than a conscious choice.

Speaking of which, our hero received all his training and indoctrination from what turns out to be an al Qaeda style terrorist network led by a madman. Just saying "I'm not like you guys" but then acting like them in every way save the use of lethal force (most of the time) does not exactly inspire confidence in our hero's motive or methods.

Before he gets his Bat costume he breaks into Gordon's office (which is stupid—once he's decided he's going to use a costume, he should use the Bat costume and the Bat costume only; only if he seized on the Bat as inspiration AFTER beginning his vigilante career would it make sense for him to ever go out without it) and has this whole coversation about what it would take to bring down Falcone—put pressure on the crooked judge, rely on Rachel the uncorrupt DA, etc. So what happens? He beats up Falcone at a drug buy that THE BOSS OF ORGANIZED CRIME IN GOTHAM CITY IS INEXPLICABLY ATTENDING PERSONALLY and ties him to a spotlight. I guess that'll work too, but why bother with the meticulous explanation of what it'll take to stop him if you're not going to do a damn thing with it?

If you're going to steal from Frank Miller—falling down the hole and discovering the bats, calling all the bats to help escape from a swat team, etc.--why not steal his greatest contribution to the Batman origin story and have a wounded, don't know what to do with himself Bruce Wayne be inspired to become Batman by a giant bat that comes crashing through the picture window of Wayne Manor? Instead he's just happily putting together his tech and is like "Oh yeah, I think bats are scary, why don't I dress up like that."

Also, if you're going to have him talk in overly formal pronunciations all the time, why not actually go the whole hog and have him give the "Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot...I shall become a bat" speech?

The "What are you?" "I'm Batman" exchange made sense in the first movie because the guy asking "What are you?" had just seen a giant bat creature materialize out of nowhere, kick his partner's ass, take bullets square in the chest and keep coming. It does NOT make sense here because Falcone hadn't seen Batman AT ALL yet.

Those were sure some boring, non-scary "scary" hallucinations at the end there, huh?

That's all for now, man. I'm spent.

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In retrospect I could get around a LOT of that if it weren't for the fact that they made this HUGE deal out of the "I'm not an executioner" thing but then had him wipe out half the League of Shadows AND presumably the handcuffed prisoner too, and behave INCREDIBLY recklessly during that pointless thrillless car chase in which he was running policemen off the road, running over their cars, etc. All the smarts of developing Batman as this terrifying yet fundamentally just force went right out the goddamn window the second he ran over his first cop car and later on bragged about it to Alfred.

I'll admit that Batman is the one character in superhero comics I'm a fanboy about (not in the icky, "Don't call him Bats--that's disrespectful" kinda way; I just really like the character), so I probably saw the film with a set of expectations that could only be completely fulfilled if I myself made the movie; but there you have it. It's driving me nuts that people think this film did a good job, because the franchise is going to be continued by people who are saying to themselves "See, we really NAILED it there!" Me and my memories of how great Tim Burton's first Batman movie was will be over here in the corner, brooding.

I just heard Iron & Wine's cover of the Postal Service's "Such Great Heights" on an M&Ms commercial.

On Friday afternoon (three cheers for getting off early from work!) I finally saw George Romero's new zombie film Land of the Dead. (Sure, it's only been out a week, but I feel I can still say "finally" since virtually everyone who knows me assumed I'd be there on opening night. Alas, I have no "zombie friends" here on Strong Island, and the Missus isn't particularly responsive to gore (though to her credit she loves Night of the Living Dead), so seeing a zombie movie requires high-level logistical coordination with either my buddies from work (which can screw up my already beastly commute home) or my friends in the city (which requires me to spend upwards of 30 bucks just to see a movie). Pulling off either one of these options requires some time and effort. But I managed.)

The first thing that strikes me about it is that it's probably the least frightening zombie movie I've yet seen. This is not to say that it isn't scary at times--there are plenty of those jump-out-at-you startling moments; just that, as a friend who saw the movie with me put it, "you get the impression that the scares are just fanservice for Romero at this point, like he'd be perfectly happy to just do a straightforward drama that happened to have zombies in it at some point." Even the gore (which was plentiful) didn't "gross me out" as gore in zombie movies, particularly in Romero zombie movies, tends to do. Maybe this is due a lot of the Savini-patented "analog" gore effects being supplanted by CGI work; maybe it's due to the arty, filter-y cinematography as compared to the bare-bones, brightly lit carnage of the original Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. With the exception of the most disturbing image involving fingernails since The Silence of the Lambs and I believe one other moment that I'm forgetting somehow, I didn't get that heebie-jeebie feeling.

But I still really enjoyed this movie, because I think that being frightening is, as my friend argued, beside the point now for Romero, and what's left is the usual thought-provoking rumination on human behavior that the best zombie movies tend to offer. (How did zombie movies become the thinking man's horror genre? And how funny is it that mainstream-media critics are treating Romero like a respected auteur? I love it!)

However, I don't feel that that rumination is as nakedly political as certain viewers, on both sides of the aisle, are making it out to be. Lefty Ian Brill's characterization of the film as a "radical" one that depicts "the neurosis of living in the 'War on Terror'" (complete with sneer quotes), and his assertion that "Decades from now it’s one you can point to when you want to tell the younger folk what life in the turn of the 21st Century was like*," strikes me as a blend of overreach and wishful thinking; righty Jon Hastings's denouncement of "the movie's conventional, boring, and safe Anti-Rich White Guy message" and accusation that Romero's "post-zombie society looks an awful lot like the paranoid fringe left-wing view of America" comes across as an overly literal reading of what Romero's up to. Only the most bona-fide braindead of lefty agitproppers could make a film about a rich white man with a black manservant who (again in the words of my movie-going buddy) all but says "feets, don't fail me now!" when he bails on his boss and populate its world with such a central-casting view of the proletariat (complete with shanty-Irish rebel kings!) and intend for it all to be taken at face value. (Maybe if we were talking about Michael Moore's Land of the Dead...) Simply put, too much of the quote-unquote political content of this movie is too funny to be taken too seriously! This is not to say that Romero's not aiming for satire once again--he is; I just don't think it maps nearly as neatly to MoveOn.org's talking points as either Ian or Jon want or fear to be the case. (I say this as an experienced umbrage-taker, by the way, and I took no umbrage. Maybe that's because when I felt the targets could be clearly identified, I tended to feel they deserved to be taken aim at?)

I also don't have the problem with the film's cash-based economy that Jon and Franklin Harris have. I'm not going to be able to put it any better than Bill Sherman did, so I'll defer to the relevant portion of his LotD review:

Some zombie lovers...have observed that Land's class-based culture--with hammy kingpin Dennis Hopper holding tight to his position as the wealthiest man in the city--doesn't make a whole lot of sense when the currency he is shown hoarding so zealously won't amount to a hill of beans. But I accepted his (and sleazy underling John Leguizamo's) irrational adherence to the idea that Money Matters, even in a land where the dead are ever-ready to pull your head off, simply because crisis frequently fosters a strong dependence on old structures. Much as the structural dynamics of racism have lingered long after its prime economic motor (slavery) ceased to exist in this country, the mechanics of a class-based culture have sufficient autonomous life to survive past the death of currency.

I'd add only that references are frequently made to "outposts" established by the rulers of the society in which LotD takes place, as well as (I believe) comments regarding the existence of other unrelated but similar communities; it seems reasonable for the characters to believe that cash is still a going concern there as well.

To me one of the film's great strengths is the way it seamlessly and organically builds upon the zombie mythos. Somebody (I feel like it was Ken Lowery, but damned if I can remember when) semi-recently argued that zombies should, by now, have as definite and defined a set of conventions (undead resurrected cannibals, contagion-laden bites, kill the brain and you kill the ghoul, etc.) as do vampires (wooden stakes, sunlight, no reflection, etc.). Since Romero is the man who gave us the vast majority of the zombie conventions we do have, we in the audience allow him more latitude than probably any other horror creator in terms of what he's "allowed" to have zombies do. And so, in Night he gave us the classic mindless horde of killers; in Dawn we saw them acting on some rudimentary remembered "human" instincts; in Day we saw that they could be trained to become semi-intelligent; and in Land Romero tells us that they can evolve into this semi-intelligent state on their own. It's a pretty bold move on Romero's part, and I for one went right along with him. (Don't expect the "revs" over in The Outbreak to start using automatic weapons anytime soon, though.)

Of course, Romero didn't introduce this innovation simply for the fun of altering the zombie canon--he did it because it made for compelling moviemaking. Head zombie Big Daddy is an instant classic monster, certainly up there with Day's Frankenstein's monster manque Bub. (At this point I've got to quote my eminently quotable friend again: "How cool would it have been if they'd used Bub as the head zombie?" The answer: Pretty damn cool! At least as cool as The Godfather Part II would have been if they could have resolved the pay dispute that necessitated replacing Clemenza with Pantangelli. And I'm sure they could have figured out a way to get Bub from Florida to what I'm assuming was the upper Midwest; hell, Tom Savini's biker character from Dawn managed!) His insectoid mass communication with the other zombies was creepy from the minute it began, and the tremendously entertaining images it enabled (the giant Apocalypse Now homage; Dennis Hopper's oily demise) coupled with our faith in Romero as a zombie griot easily overcame whatever aversion we might have had toward the "smart zombie" concept.

Speaking of Hopper--well, how can you not when you're talking about this movie? My big concern, particularly after seeing that "zombies, man--they creep me out" line in the trailer, was that he'd crank the camp up to eleven. What a pleasant surprise his understated--"deadpan [and] flat" says Jon Hastings, and like him I feel that's a compliment in this case--performance was, then. As the subject of a satire this broad, Hopper could have brought the movie crashing down and validated the complaints that this was a hamfisted White Guys Suck flick if he treated his character like his Blue Velvet villain with political clout.. Instead he played it cool, and therefore convincing. He had at least three lines that absolutely killed: "In a world where the dead are returning to life, the word 'trouble' has lost its meaning" (used as the epigraph for Steven at Corpse Eaters's review; "We don't negotiate with terrorists" (absolutely hilarious in context); and the real doozy, the bit about "Hey, look out, get down, quick!", which had me and my friends laughing for a solid two minutes afterward.

I was also impressed by John Leguizamo, who Summer of Sam proved is a fine actor despite the dreck he tends to get stuck in outside of his one-man shows. I guess you could interpret the fact that his character Cholo is one of the film's most sympathetic despite committing (or certainly planning to commit) the least sympathetic acts of anyone in the movie as a flaw in the text, but I credit it to Leguizamo's skill as a performer and to Romero's refusal to go black-and-white on us. As Steven points out, Cholo is all too aware of why he is what he is, and this awareness gives even his brashest actions a tinge of regret. It's a complexity that puts Cholo in the lineage of Night's heroic and wrongheaded Ben (discussed at length here) or Dawn's forlornly self-interested Peter. All in all, I'd say that between this and the Dawn of the Dead remake, the wisdom of casting semi-famous, solid character actors in your zombie movie has been borne out.

Back to the political, for a moment: Mainly I found Land's targets to be the kinds of things that deserve to be targeted--racism, classism, and to a certain degree sexism. (What was with that lesbian make-out session the zombies put the kibosh on, anyway? It's the kind of complicating detail that makes this movie a difficult one to ascribe a talking-points reading to.) These issues, of course, are not particularly tied in to Our Current Situation any more than they'd be tied in to any other era (unless you choose to ascribe Romero's bestowal of the Jewish surname Kaufman to Dennis Hopper's robber baron as some sort of oblique indictment of the neocons or AIPAC or something, in which case, knock yourself out), and they're gone after with the sort of blunt savagery that the continued existence of these targets should always provoke. But what Romero did nail with regard to the here and now is the willingness of every side of the present-day debate to coopt that debate's heightened language in order to further their petty agendas. Remember that Kaufman's line about negotiating with terrorists is mirrored by the vindictive and money-mad Cholo's threat to "go jihad on Kaufman's ass." I laughed at both lines--a laugh of recognition, sad to say.

And yeah, there are great moments that will go down with Johnny's return or the helicopter blade or Tom Savini's machete from the previous Dead movies. And there's Asia Argento, the presence of whom is meta on any number of levels. So horror fans won't be disappointed, I don't think. They also won't be able to walk away easily, and that's the real beauty of Land of the Dead.

(Further recommended reading: All of the afore-linked reviews and critiques of the film by various members of the comics- and horror blogospheres; this terrific Clive Barker quote as dredged up by Bill Sherman.)


*That's the kind of accolade I'd reserve for Night; I can't say this for sure since I wasn't alive during the time it was made, but the impression I get is that it's a more effective depiction of its turbulent era than Land, Day, or even the lauded-to-the-heavens on this score Dawn are of theirs precisely because its text and subtext are much more segregated (pun intended) than in the later films.)

My Land of the Dead review has just been edited to fix some wonky html that made a goodly chunk of it incomprhensible. FYI.

(Because it's not just the Dark But Shining boys who can bring you frightening things to look at online...)

Last night my wife stumbled across this short film. With no background information other than "this is weird," we were equal parts enthralled and horrified by what we saw: footage, shot in night vision to further enhance its snuff-film/lab-surveillance verisimilitude, of a mutant man-child. This is real nightmare material.

What it is is "Rubber Johnny," a short film by music video director Chris Cunningham using the music of his frequent collaborator Aphex Twin. (Before I discovered this, I definitely thought to myself "gee, someone's a big 'Come to Daddy' fan...") In addition to the film itself and the project's homepage, further information about it can be found here (interview with Cunningham included) and here.

I haven't really seen all that much of Cunningham's work, but I always really got a kick out of just how over the top his videos for Aphex Twin are, particularly because they mesh so perfectly with the comparatively outre Aphex songs he's been tapped to adapt; the Clive Barker references in "Come to Daddy" were an especial treat for me (as it turns out, Cunningham has worked for Barker in the past), and his outrageously tacky video for "Windowlicker" ended up being pretty prophetic in terms of the techno-video aesthetic. (It's also worth noting that Aphex (aka Richard D. James) has made some of the most subtly frightening music I've ever heard--his Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 contains some moments of genuine glacial terror (a clear influence on nine inch nails auteur Trent Reznors soundtrack work for the influential first-person-shooter/horror videogame Quake), and the way the cheerily hideous lyric "I would like some milk from the milkman's wife's tits" blindsides you in Richard D. James Album's "Milkman" is unforgettable.) I'm impressed with this new foray into horror from the pair.

Go and look.

War of the Worlds review coming soon. Teaser observation: If this movie had used zombies instead of aliens and was directed by George Romero instead of Steven Spielberg yet was in every other way the same, the genre in-crowd would be going berserk for it right about now. And there's more where THAT came from!

In the meantime, here's Quicktime video of every single Live 8 performance. (Link courtesy of Stereogum.) Roxy Music kick out the jams. So do Keane. And Floyd, man. Floyd.

--Generals, "The Funniest Joke in the World," Monty Python's Flying Circus

I have to say (without having seen the movie) that I'm thrilled Fantastic Four did as well as it did. Why? Simply because I find watching conventional wisdom form before my very eyes...annoying. And man OH man did everybody want this movie to bomb. Everybody was dying for this movie to bomb. From the celebrity snark specialists to the MSM critics to (in a relentless full-court press--how quickly we forget! (UPDATE: Whoop, we remember.)) the establishment comics-movie-crit types, the knives were out.

And not only does it not bomb, it breaks The Slump!

Since everybody I know personally who's seen the film has told me (at worst) it's better than they thought it would be, if not that it was in fact a really fun movie, I had a hunch the supposedly hideous opening weekend and subsequent poisonous word-of-mouth weren't likely to materialize. Again, I haven't seen the movie, so maybe I'll dislike it. Then again, I tend to dislike the superhero movies that the Establishment refers to with reverent awe--Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, The Incredibles, Batman Begins, Hellboy--so seeing as how the reactions here are along the lines of the reactions to Daredevil (my favorite of the post Batman & Robin superhero crop, probably, though I like the X-Men movies too), I'm guessing I'll kinda dig it. Sure, I'll probably pine for Jack Kirby's visual genius and Stan Lee's instinctive knack for character. But mainly, for now, I'm just feeling schadenfreude that so many were so wrong about so much. (Insert smiling emoticon here.)

Post inspired in part (as is quite a bit around here, actually) by Jog.

Steven Spielberg is one of the most fascinating Hollywood directors, because he's probably the one filmmaker whose own preferences and techniques dictate those of Hollywood itself. That's why, whether we're talking about Saving Private Ryan, A.I., Minority Report, or the film I saw the other night, War of the Worlds, I think it's unfair to deried his now-trademark unearned happy endings as pandering to Hollywood values. After all, over the past 30 years, Hollywood values have become whatever Steven Spielberg wants them to be.

And if the spate of large-scale genre films listed above is any indication, what he wants them to be are bleak, disturbing, and viciously cruel almost--almost--to the point of relentlessness. In the past, I've argued that what holds him back from going full-scale Texas Chain Saw-nihilist on us is his belief (endlessly derided by his critics, though not in so many words) that humanity isn't a giant pile of shit. If there's an explanation other than a trendy love of cynicism for why people could compare the brutal yet ultimately optimistic Private Ryan unfavorably to the unending parades of cheesy war-movie cliches that were Platoon and The Thin Red Line, I'd love to hear it. At any rate it's tough to argue that the happy endings of the aforementioned Spielberg films send people walking way from the theater whistling a happy tune; if anything, they're the micron of sugar that helps the extremely nasty medicine go down.

But I think there's something extra brutal about War of the Worlds, in that the ending feels so tacked on and gratuitous and unearned that the redemptive flavor of the Spielberg "and they lived, if not happily, then well ever after" ending is lost. In part this is due to Spielberg's fealty to H.G. Wells' original ending, the happy patness of which only serves to reinforce humanity's impotence against the alien onslaught that the book concerns itself with. But even moreso, it's due to the gruesomeness of what's come before. And I'm not just talking about the actions of the aliens, with their disintegration beams and human fertilizer. Mainly what I'm talking about is the man who bashes a hole in the rear window of the Ferrier family's stolen SUV, then begins tearing the glass apart with his bare, bloody hands.

In other words, and playing firmly against type, Spielberg is giving us an apocalypse movie where the apocalypse brings out the worst in people, rather than the best.

This concept that is fascinating to me, as you might have guessed. We all want to believe that our post-armageddon character arcs would run something like Jake Weber's in the Dawn of the Dead remake. But for me the truly terrifying element of apocalyptic horror is not (just) the genre-driven mechanics of the apocalypse itself--be it extraterrestrial, viral, avian, or undead in nature--but the nagging fear that if faced with such circumstances I'd be a lot more like Barbara in Night of the Living Dead, or Kaufman or Cholo in Land of the Dead, or the guys who set up the mobile rape camp in the novel version of The Stand. The fear that I'd fall to pieces, or become a barbarian. The fear that I can't hack it.

In War of the Worlds, we're presented with lots of people who can't hack it. Foremost among them, I would argue, is Tom Cruise's character, Ray Ferrier. Many have argued that Spielberg heroicizes this everyman simply through his casting choice, which is an understandable argument, but I daresay that Cruise's sudden outbreak of inanity-slash-insanity over the past few months helped his character rather than hurt him. When Cruise is asked to play an asshole incapable of behaving responsibly, it's suddenly a lot easier to believe the result.

From the moment the alien attack erupts, Spielberg and Cruise give Ray a consistently self-interested behavior pattern. Beyond the desire to protect his children--a desire so tough to shake among non-sociopaths that it hardly qualifies as heroism, especially here--Ray's actions are never outside the box of basic flight-or- well, flight; as society breaks down around him, he's really more than willing to participate in that breakdown, as is established from the moment he (wisely) steals the minivan from the mechanic and (also wisely) refuses to pick up any of the thousands of stranded humans he drives past. He's also shown failing on any number of occasions--he orders his son to quickly pack some food, but all the son can find in Ray's bachelor pad are condiments; he lets his son drive the van while he himself gets some shut-eye but fails to instruct the kid to keep well clear of people; his whole plan--to travel to Boston and rendez-vous with his ex-wife, her current husband, and her parents--is a mixture of fairy-tale wishful thinking and an inarticulated desire to fob off the responsibility for his children on their more capable caregiver. (When his son calls him on this last bit, Ray gets upset, but does not deny it.) Particularly wrenching is the scene in which Ray must quite literally choose between his children. Ray has been glibly (heh heh) and unthinkingly self-interested his entire life, and Cruise nails the horror (and, subtly, the resentment) that making a genuine life-or-death decision would fill such a man with. Moreover, the circumstances in which this decision is made reinforce the futility of the sort of heroism Ray's son has been attempting to demonstrate throughout the film. (That's if the scene in which the son risks his life to pull clinging stragglers onto a boat only to have the boat capsized by the aliens shortly thereafter didn't already hit that point home. And that's only a minute or two after meeting tthe family friends who were introduced only to be gut-wrenchingly abandoned...) By the time it dawns on Ray the type of person in whose basement he's sealed himself and his daughter, I was reminded of the rueful blend of rage, regret, and selfish self-pity found in a line uttered by Tony Soprano in his eponymous show's fifth season: "All of my choices were wrong."

And perhaps that's an appropriate quote to kick off a discussion of the film's final third. It's the part of the movie that forces even its most die-hard defenders to call it "flawed," though for my money the flaws are fascinating. Have you ever seen a section of a movie that alternates between brilliance and incoherence so many times in such rapid succession? The big out-of-the-shadows "hey look! It's Tim Robbins!" intro shot did not augur well for the upcoming sequence, and my initial misgivings (allayed for a moment by Robbins's pretty solid tri-state area dialect, complete with "you're welcome to stay, both'a yez") were justified the moment Robbins began his ham-fisted "I'm crazy, get it?" bugout. But then there's the moment where Cruise, driven to desperation by not knowing any lullabies to sing his daughter, resorts to crooning "Little Deuce Coupe" by the Beach Boys. It's a moment that got quite a few unintentional (?) laughs from the audience, but I think it hit pretty hard (speaking as someone whose dad sang him a few Beach Boys songs as lullabies himself). But then there's that unbelievably long and tedious and ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with the alien probe, the detection technology of which apparently hasn't advanced that far beyond that of velociraptors. But then there's the weird (in the old-school sense) and gruesome red-vine sequence, including the use of human blood as fertilizer and the shots of Cruise and Robbins becoming aware of what's being sprayed all over the place. But then there's the dopey Indepence Day aliens and more Jurassic Park cat-and-mouse. But then there's that silent struggle for the shotgun with Robbins. But then the tension's deflated with a goofball line, and the opportunity for Ray to do what he ends up doing minutes later only during the most Hollywood-y suspense sequence of the movie is wasted. But then there's that terrific line--"You know what I'm going to have to do..."--and the blindfolding and the singing and the off-screen murder. And--actually, things tighten up there once again, as the desperate-times "heroism" of that action is immediately undone by another alien probe (that's smart filmmaking, man). Maybe my favorite part of the film is when Ray grabs that ax and chops away, enraged but in vain, at the tentacle-like probe, with the past two hours' worth of tension and disgust pouring out of the audience in an enormous wave of futile catharsis. I even bought his subsequent hand-grenade-wielding saving of the day, since so much of it depended on dumb luck rather than extraordinary actions. And even there Spielberg ladled out more awfulness as we watch a captured human sucked into the alien tripod's orifice to be spit out as liquid. Dumb luck in the face of awfulness, ultimately, is all that saves humanity from extinction; we see it in microcosm before we see it writ large, is all.

Then there's the "happy" ending at the end of it all, with the improbably reunited family--ex-wife, ex-in-laws, new husband, even presumed dead son. I invite viewers to watch that scene again, and as more and more family members appear to greet Ray and his daughter as they stumble down the street, tell me that Spielberg's not aware of exactly how ridiculous this is given the movie we've just watched. (John Williams is certainly aware of it: The expected joyous fanfare is nowhere to be found.) It's a happy ending so transparently contrived that, as far as I'm concerned, it's a critique of happy endings. It certainly doesn't do anything to gain supremacy of memory over the image of Ray washing the ashen remains of other human beings from his face, or the lengthy closeup on that fleeing woman in the department store that ends only when she's blasted from the face of the earth, or the literal river of dead bodies, or the mutilated cow (Close Encounters, Jurassic Park, Private Ryan, WotW--Spielberg and dead cows, man) during the hand-grenade sequence. And on. And on. And on.

So yes: If this movie had used zombies instead of aliens and was directed by George Romero instead of Steven Spielberg yet was in every other way the same, the genre in-crowd would be going berserk for it right about now. And not just because of the tremendously proficient craft and abundant scares, the latter of which I'm not alone in finding lacking in Romero's latest effort (see Matt Maxwell's excellent and insightful LotD review, which overstates the "it's not horror" case a bit (it's still zombies eating people, after all) but is otherwise rock-solid). It's got that message, is what I'm saying.

See, I watched this movie on 7/7, the day of the London terrorist bombings, so I ended up eschewing the absurd current-events interpretation offered by the film's own screenwriter and seeing things through a different lens. What I saw was a far more universal critique than one directed at a particular nation's particular administration's particular conduct in a particular nation in a particular region. It was in the way the rubbernecking crowd at the crater in Ray's town erupted into frantic chaos. (Though I found myself thinking "they should all be using cameraphones at this point"--learned that one the hard way, didn't we?) It was in the claustrophobic mob scene around Ray's SUV. It was in the 9/11-style flyers and posters, and the orderly and hopeless lines of fleeing survivors. It was in the way every single safe haven reached by the family was violated almost immediately. It was in the "what a story" reporter and her literally deaf cameraman. It was in the way it plays upon your suspicion that your own reaction to tragedy and terror is in some way deficient, base, selfish, stupid, subhuman. It's the methodical articulation (vast and cool and unsympathetic) of the fear that disaster is degrading.

POSTSCRIPT: Click here for some final thoughts.


Recommended reviews:

Steven at Corpse Eaters

Jon Hastings at The Forager

Bill Sherman at Pop Culture Gadabout

Jon Hastings has posted a brief rejoinder to my review of War of the Worlds. The gist of Jon's new post is that no, Spielberg fully intended that "happy ending" to be a straightforward, honest-to-god happy ending, and has said as much about similar scenes in other films he's made. In that case I'll take back what I said about Spielberg's intent to make a happy ending so unearned and tacked-on that it serves as a backhanded critique of happy endings--but that don't mean that that ain't how it ends up reading! If Spielberg truly felt that audiences would cheerily buy the father-and-child reunion at the end of WotW, he really needs someone to sit him down and explain some things to him. I'm still not 100% convinced he wasn't aware of what he was doing--those musical cues are key, methinks--but hey, food for thought.

And also hey, I certainly think this tactic is a flaw in his filmmaking because it's basically superfluous, but it's an interesting flaw to me, rather than an infuriating one. And it may well make his movies more, not less, compelling as art, if not as narratives.

I would also like to second Jon's motion that Spielberg giving the people what he thinks they want is no more or less contrived than Lars Von Trier giving the people what he thinks they need--which is a roundabout way of Lars Von Trier giving them what he wants, and what he thinks they deserve.

...deep in the throes of San Diego Deprivation Syndrome...

...need infusion of panel discussions, $4 water, and shopping spree at the Comic Relief and Bud Plant booths STAT...

Well, at least I'm learning something: This is the last time I'll miss an SDCC.

In response to the bit in my Land of the Dead review where I discuss the zombie's comparative lack of vampire-style formal conventions (wooden stakes, sucking blood, nocturnal, that sort of thing), Tom Collins has decided to show me up by creating an absurdly comprehensive post chronicling just how many variations both the vampire and zombie myths have in the movies. Truly a masterpiece of linkblogging.

Courtesy of the indispensable Bryan Alexander comes a project close to my heart: a werewolf blog. That's what I'm talkin' 'bout, people. Actually, I haven't read much of it yet, but flipping through the final few entries I appreciate that the blog doesn't really have an ending in the style of a traditional narrative; the writer understands that blogging is not just writing a novel in daily installments.

Shhhh, big secret: I've never seen a single Italian zombie movie. Not even Zombi 2, for pete's sake! (And I've also only ever seen one giallo--Deep Red. My Italo-tyro status is one of the things that make me a lousy horror fan.) So I'm happy to hear (from Steven at Corpse Eaters) that all of the Tombs of the Blind Dead movies are coming out on DVD. They sound nice and hideous.

Finally, file this under horror in unexpected places: "Four Kicks," the latest video by hipster redneck-rockers Kings of Leon. Previously best known for their dubious insistence that they've never listened to Creedence Clearwater Revival, they're likely to make quite a splash with the graphically violent brawl depicted here. The video's innovation is to freeze the action whenever the lead singer is singing, allowing the viewer to see brightly lit close-ups on a woman's face just before it's about to be pounded with the butt of a fire extinguisher, or an exploded lamp the second after it's been smashed over a man's head. Unfortunately I can't find a nice-and-easy permalink to direct you to--RCA's music video page appears to be one where old videos are cleared away to make room for new ones, Kings of Leon's official website is all Flash so I can't actually link directly to their video page, and in a display of fuckheadery typical for the network, MTV.com's copy of the video is not Mac-compatible. But it won't take you more than five seconds to find the video either of the first two sites. Note that I actually recommend you watch the Real video version rather than the Quicktime one--even in hi res, the QT video is a blurry mess. Check it out, and if you like what you see keep your eyes peeled for it on your better music-video TV shows for a crystal-clear version.

Two comics-related items of note that I'm reasonably sure I can talk about:

1) The final (I think?) piece I wrote for The Comics Journal before taking my current job, my review of Paradise Kiss, is featured in issue #269, which came out this week. It's the long-anticipated shoujo manga issue, so do check it out.

2) Partyka's Matt Wiegle was once again kindly enough to draw a comic I wrote. The result, deceptively entitled "Pornography" though it's quite safe for work, can now be found here. I hope you enjoy it; perhaps you'll check out the other comics I've written as well.

J. Donelson of the excellent comics blog the Pickytarian directs us, almost unwittingly it would seem, to the fine horror-tinged work of his wife, artist Amy Talluto. Check out this series of transmogrified pin-up poses (complete with double-entendre postcard taglines) in which the bathing beauties have been replaced with average-sized women. Well, with their bodies, at least. Their heads are nowhere to be found. Talluto's statement on the series emphasizes the drawings' critique of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue aesthetic, but that could have been accomplished simply through the self-portraiture aspect of the project; chop those heads off and you've got a new, violent, eerie animal on your hands. Take a look.

The best dance band in the world (maybe the best anything band in the world, acutally), Underworld, has a new song out. It's stunning, but then you knew that it would be.

(Link courtesy of One Louder.)

I wasn't the slightest bit interested in any of the bands at the Siren Festival this year. Take your dull hipster rock and shove it, man.

Well, duh. This page just happens to convey this more literally than usual.

Zombiewood brings you graphically, convincingly zombified renditions of big Hollywood celebrities, through the magic of photoshop.

Note one: I posted that Willem Defoe one because it's the least likely to freak out people who might not want to see this sort of thing--trust me, they get a lot worse, and therefore a lot better, than that. Halle Berry and Charlize Theron are truly stunning.

Note two: The link leads you just to the most recent of several rounds of zombie-celeb pics--use that "View Related Contests" togglebar and feat your eyes.

I think this is some very creepy stuff. Thank you, Internet.

Spoilers galore. Highlight to read.

So, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I'm not sure what to make of Snape killing Dumbledore, as well as Malfoy actually being a Death Eater-in-training. Despite the fact that the formula of the series (see link here) is "Harry spends a few hundred pages being told he's wrong, but then in the end it turns out that he's right and everybody else is wrong," I STILL thought they were just hitting the whole "Snape is still a Death Eater and Draco's up to no good! Seriously! Listen!" thing too hard for it to be totally borne out--esp. when Harry's obsession with Draco's supposed malfeasance starts distracting him from the supposedly more important mission regarding Slughorn's memory that Dumbledore had assigned him. But lo and behold, Harry is once again shown to be right and everyone else was wrong to have doubted him. I can't tell if this is supposed to be taken at face value or not--if the former, then to be frank the writing is a little weak. But then I've always thought that about these books. I mean, the big prophecy that we spend the whole last book trying to figure out is that Harry and Voldemort are bound by fate to confront each other, and one will destroy the other? No shit, Sherlock! (see link here)

I was also disappointed that it was Dumbledore who bought it, because you could see it coming from about 100 miles away. Gee, you mean the wise old wizard who's been Harry's guide for the past six years has been slain and now Harry will be forced to stand alone and confront his nemesis with nothing but his own courage? Who'd'a thunk it? I was guessing/hoping that she'd kill Ron or Hermione, but oh well.

What was up with Cho being on the back cover, but barely in the book at all? That made me think it was Cho who was going to be killed--purely a fake-out?

I must admit I spent the entire book thinking Harry must be mildly retarded for not figuring out that the Half-Blood Prince was Voldemort, who he'd just seen had a muggle for a dad and a witch for a mom, and whose career at Hogwarts he'd been watching through the Penseive. But it turned out to be a total fakeout and it was Snape all along. I kinda felt like there wasn't enough info supporting the "it's Snape" angle to justify that total a fakeout. I've made this point before (a little louder that time, admittedly), but a good twist reveals clues that had been there all along under your nose, which you can then go back and say "Man, how could I have been so BLIND???"; a bad one just blindsides you. This one gave you a whole lot of information to support one theory and then pulled it all out from under you and said "nope, it's really this other guy!" I guess you could note that since Snape was the potions teacher, he probably was a potions prodigy, but I still think it was sort of weak.

Still, it was fun to read, and it's the kind of book you plow through (if only to avoid getting it spoiled!). I thought Rowling had some really nice prose in this one, esp. the bit about the "hard, blazing look" Ginny gave Harry right before they kissed for the first time--that was a really unexpected, and yet apt, turn of phrase.

What did people make of the chapter called "The Cave," or as I like to call it "The J.R.R. Tolkien Tribute Concert"? This was certainly the most Tolkien-heavy book in the series overall--even the prose got Tolkienesque at times, particularly in the last few pages--but this chapter alone had allusions to Gollum's cave, the Dead Marshes, the Watcher in the Water, the Paths of the Dead, the Mirror of Galadriel, Weathertop, the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, the Window on the West, and probably even more that I'm forgetting. Meanwhile all of Dumbledore's soliloquies regarding Voldemort's past read like excerpts from "The Shadow of the Past" and "The Council of Elrond." After watching her dance around the influence for five books, it was intriguing to see Rowling dive in head-first on the sixth.

And how about that Spider-Man movie ending, with Harry breaking up with Ginny "for her own good"? Many comics critics hate the whole "my superherodom causes the women in my life to suffer--how awful for me!" thing because it uses the suffering of women as a means toward supposedly making the men more interesting, rather than treating women as people in their own right for whom their own suffering means more than a character-building exercise for the super-men in their lives--but now here's the biggest author in the world, who happens to be a woman, doing the exact same thing!

Haunted houses, werewolves, demons, Dracula, and lots and lots of zombies: Genre-based fictionblogging is where it's at. Lately I've found a couple of sites to add to that roster:

Velvet Marauder, a long-running semi-parodic superhero blog run by David Campbell, proprietor of the deservedly popular comics humor site Dave's Long Box;

and Siege Mentality, a new zombie blog by Crobuzon that appears, if Crobuzon's comment at my zombie blog The Outbreak is any indication, to be operating in the fictional world I've already established. Neat! I'm curious to see where he goes with things--most zombie blogs tilt to a far more survivalist slant than I've given my own, and indeed the mechanics of the zombie outbreak I'm chronicling were designed to reflect this preference.

Finally, on an unrelated topic, David Edelstein at Slate defends the right of Steven Spielberg--of genre, really--to tackle real-life tragedy. (He also rejects screenwriter David Koepp's interpretation of the film's politics. (Hey, the horrorblogosphere today, the poliblogosphere tomorrow!)) In one passage he echoes what I've been telling people who ask about the movie:

[War of the Worlds] has more in common with Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan than with Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park.

And he even throws in the horror-fan CW that Night of the Living Dead is one of the best depictions of late-'60s turmoil ever made. We've come a long way, baby!

I really like this passage from Julia Turner's Slate piece on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

[J.K. Rowling is] not using Harry to make points about terrorism. She's using terrorism to make points about Harry. Rowling culls the scariest elements of modern life and uses them as a kind of shorthand, a quick way to instill fear.

I hadn't thought about it in that exact way before, but I think it describes the situation perfectly. I think the thing that has most intrigued me about the series as it's gone on is the way the mechanics of Voldemort and his minions the Death Eaters have slowly transformed from nebulous fantasy-stock Dark Lordisms to real down-and-dirty hands-on torture and, especially, murder. As compelling as Tolkien's Sauron is, there's something impersonal in his grand-scale plottings and massive armies; Voldemort, on the other hand, has his cult members break into houses, schools, and government offices and execute people. I think Rowling likely went this route because unlike most fantasy villains, Voldemort does not control territory, not even a castle or fortress. Quite like terrorist cells or organized crime gangs, he and his followers are everywhere and nowhere, and when they strike, it's with individuated strikes against civilians. It's wetwork.

Has everyone seen this UK TV promo for Lost, directed by David LaChapelle and using the show's cast in a sort of strange music video for Portishead's song "Numb"? No? Well, you have now.

A couple of quick items:

The Yahoo mailing list for the very good horror fictionblog project Dionaea House was updated today by site creator Eric Heisserer. Money quote:

Wheels are still turning at Warner Brothers as we get closer to a green light for The Dionaea House. The producers have begun hunting for a director who understands the tone and feel of the story, and some of their choices are quite exciting. I don't want to jinx anything just yet, but soon as a director comes on board, I'll let this list know.

Meanwhile (and I hope the Dark But Shining boys will pardon me for walking their beat), the Internet Archive has made Robert Wiene's seminal German horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari available for free download. This is a remarkably beautiful, creepy, and complex film even by today's standards--simply put, it's a must-see.

That's all!

Apparently, a murder has been solved on a blog. More here. Blogger John Allore, who maintains a a website dedicated to the investigation of his sister's still-unsolved disappearance in 1978, blogged about a similar case that occurred earlier this month, and an anonymous commenter provided a theory that, if a recent arrest in the case is any indication, may well be true. Fascinating and chilling, this is one for the Infocult files (indeed, my first thought was "this must be another fictionblog"). And in a way it serves as a relatively uplifting counterpoint to the case of Joseph Edward Duncan, who wrote on his blog that "the demons have taken over" four days before killing a family of five.

(Link courtesy of Glenn Reynolds.)

...will be happening for the horror blogosphere around these parts shortly. Watch this space.

The original incarnation of Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat (at least once I hit my stride) was a comicsblog. When I started, there were just a handful of people regularly blogging about comics; it was a thrill to watch that number grow, and that community mature and thrive, before my very eyes. I like to think that my relentless link- and think-blogging had a hand in that, though the credit should really go to the Blogfather of us all, Neil, and the great Journalista, Dirk.

But the final piece of the puzzle, the thing that transformed the comics blogosphere from a small group of people talking amongst themselves to a big giant self-perpetuating communal chunk of the Internet, was Dave "Babar" G.'s Comic Weblog Update Page. The Comics Weblog Update-A-Tron 3000, as it is affectionately known, keeps running track of each time each comics blog is updated--it's the world's largest comics-centric blogroll and the most comprehensive comics-centric live bookmark page all rolled into one. It's one-stop shopping for the 'sphere, it enables you to keep tabs on what everyone is doing and saying, and (incidentally) it generates tons of hits for each page listed on it. For the comics blogosphere, it was a godsend.

Regular readers of ADDTF will know that the emergence of the horrorblogosphere has been a subject of fascination and delight for me ever since I started blogging here again (and at The Outbreak, for obvious reasons). But psyched as I was to discover all these kindred spirits, I found myself visiting their sites a lot less frequently than their comicsblogging brethren, simply because the Comic Weblog Update Page had spoiled me so. And thusly, and idea was born:

Where the Monsters Go: The Horrorblog Update Page.

It works just like the CWUP: get your blog an RSS feed, start pinging blo.gs (many blogging platforms do this automatically, but I like to do it manually at Ping-O-Matic), let me know you want to be on the site, then I'll check out your blog. If it qualifies--and all that means is "if it talks about horror in any way shape or form with some frequency"--I'll throw it on up there.

Please keep in mind that the blogs you'll find on there now are just the ones I'm currently aware of. I scoured my blogroll, then scoured the blogrolls of the blogs on my blogroll, and here's what I came up with. If there are noticeable absences, there's a chance they don't ping blo.gs, but it's more likely that I just missed 'em, so please let me know. The more help and feedback I get from you all, the better a resource for the horrorblogosphere Where the Monsters Go will become.

Two special thanks must be made at this point: First to Dave G.--the hard work was his, and we pretty much just ripped him off; second to Ken Bromberg, member of the All Too Flat triumvirate and webmaster extraordinaire--he's the one who set all this up at my behest, and he's basically the man.

Enough of my yakkin'. Click here and start exploring. There's a lot of horror on this Internet. Here's hoping we've made it a little easier to find.

A big hello to ADDTF's new visitors and readers! May I suggest that after perusing the Horrorblog Update Page, you check out my pride 'n' joy, The Outbreak? It's my account of my life during a major zombie infestation (not an apocalypse, and it's a distinction with a difference I assure you). I think you'll like it.

I've also written some horror-tinged comics you may want to check out. (Watch out for "1995" if you happen to be at work or around impressionable eyes, though.) And I did a whole huge horrorblogging marathon a couple years back, with all sorts of papers and essays from college and big long movie reviews and such sprinkled throughout. And if you're in the mood for some yuks, you could do worse than All Too Flat proper--just click around those tabs above and see where the day takes you. The sites in my blogroll have the ADDTF imprimatur too.

Finally, if you want my webmasters and hosts to love you forever, click through to those three ads you see on your right. Hell, use tabbed browsing and you'll barely even know you did it.


And I think that about covers it. Welcome!

Now this is a thing of beauty:

Boing Boing reports on a zombie flashmob roaming the streets of San Francisco. Pertinent links may be found here, here, and here.

My only question, besides "why couldn't this have taken place on Long Island?", is "were they slow zombies or fast zombies?" My guess is slow. This is legendarily mellow San Fran we're talking about, after all.