gene wolfe – the wizard knight

Why is Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight one of the most essential works of literary fantasy of the decade? What makes a work that so proudly emblazons itself with every tired, cliched hallmark of Tolkienesque high fantasy, seem so fresh, exciting and relevant almost a full decade into the twenty-first century?

Tolkien expressed sentiments to the effect that fantasy literature required a secondary world that is entirely stable, and whose reality is never in doubt or question. The reader’s suspension of disbelief, he suggested, depended on there being no doubt, within the space and fiction of the text, that the fantasy world is “real”. Compare Tolkien’s pseudo-medieval mythic milieu to, say, Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. Middle-Earth is a construct of impregnable solidity, consistency and palpable reality; you are never in any doubt, while you are reading The Lord of the Rings, that it is as real as England or Norway.

Wolfe’s world in The Wizard Knight is almost as solid, yet infintely more fantastical. An interlocking system of seven hierarchical worlds existing on different time-frames, this world in itself is an astonishing creation that gives rise to passages and images of almost stunning beauty. The human world, Mythgartr, is the middle world; beneath that lies Aelfrice, the world of the Aelf, a world of ancient, mossy forests, across whose sky the human seasons and generations play out in the space of a day. Above us lies Skai, the world of the Valkyries and of the Odin-like Valfather, whose magnificent castle some are lucky enough to glimpse once in a lifetime amidst the clouds of Mythgartr. And so on.

This seven-tiered cosmology is as intricate, engaging and wondrous a secondary world as any I have encountered in fantasy; however, in a move that would not be out of place in a modernist novel but that is virtually unheard-of in high fantasy, this world is filtered through a narrating consciousness that is dubious, naive, unsure of itself, almost certainly lost and confused, and not consistently honest. The voice is that of Arthur, a young boy, and the novel is an extended letter he is writing to his brother, Ben. Arthur seems to believe he and Ben are from America, but he is not sure where that is, or whether it is real, or why he is not in Kansas any more. He is not sure who he is, or whether his memories of Ben and America are real or figments of his imagination. And though the whole novel takes place in the “fantasy” world, there are a handful of instances where Arthur (or Sir Able of the High Heart, which is the name he ends up with) has visions that we recognize as “our” world. There is no stability to latch onto here, whether in the “fantasy” world, the “real” one, or the narrator’s perception of both. There is only a perplexed consciousness enmeshed in shifting realities.

Above all else, Wolfe is a prose stylist virtually unequalled in contemporary English-language fiction. He can write a passage about the rotting corpse of a knight magically animated as a fighting automaton and it brings a vivid chill to your spine as if you’ve just been introduced to the idea of the undead. He can describe a meagre band of knights heroically charging an army of giants and you can feel your spirits soar as if you’re fourteen and discovering Tolkien again. In The Wizard Knight, Wolfe reanimates high fantasy and conclusively demonstrates, in an era when the New Weird has captured the limelight, that there is life in the genre yet.

Just don’t expect him to give you what you expect. As always, Wolfe is poet and imagist first, and storyteller second; and Arthur/Sir Able’s narration, built on elisions, analepsis and metalepsis, hesitations, and occasional confused ramblings, only gestures in the direction of a coherent narrative. The story is there, and it does reach points of coalescence, especially in the second volume, where new levels of it come into view, but it is a story delivered in fragments. The Wizard Knight will spend chapter upon chapter building up to a grand, decisive battle, then suddenly skip forward several years, to when the battle is a distant memory.

What is it interested in, then? The main thrust of the story is Arthur/Sir Able’s love for the Aelf Queen Disiri, whom he first encounters at the start of the novel and whom, in the best courtlty love tradition, he must spend the remainder of the tale in winning. This being Wolfe, there is more to this than meets the eye, and it seems to be, especially given some late revelations concerning the nature of the Aelf, that Able’s relationship with Disiri is, at least on one level, Wolfe reflecting on the allure of fantasy itself – caught between the threat of escapism, the eternally unfulfilling, questing nature of attempting to grasp the imaginary, and yet, paradoxically, also the hope of the inspirational. In trying to be worthy of the Queen, Able makes himself a great knight, slays dragons, wins the legendary sword Eterne, becomes virtually a god.

There is certainly something about The Wizard Knight’s whole-hearted adoption of the courtly medieval ethic that is troubling. It is, at heart, a paean to a hierarchically-ordered society with the King firmly at the top and God above him, and Able gladly adopts a rigidly codified ethics where he does not hesitate in violently striking his best friend for speaking out of place to a nobleman, feeling that it is his duty to do so since he is a knight and his friend a commoner. This makes Able  a distinctly unpleasant protagonist at times, and it’s a brave move – rarely is the protagonist as irrevocably a part of the secondary world, even in a moral sense, as Able is.  It’s certainly possible to argue that high fantasy as a genre is essentially predicated on such a hierarchical order of existence, and The Wizard Knight is without a doubt the first novel since Tolkien to have made me care so passionately about the divine right of kings. It cannot, of course, simply be taken as Wolfe’s elegiac lament for the good old days of monarchy and nobility; I am more inclined to think it is Wolfe’s way of confronting the reader with the political and ethical underpinnings of medieval fantasy, another aspect of the novel’s unfolding of the simultaneous dangers, raptures and possibilities inherent in the act of fantasy. It is, at any rate, another layer in this astonishingly dense, brilliant work, a novel that, like everything Wolfe writes, virtually demands multiple readings before revealing its secrets. The Wizard Knight is perhaps not Wolfe at his very best, but it is an essential work, another masterpiece, and confirmation that he stands among the greatest writers of his generation.

brikkuni strike again (mitp, valletta, 03/01/09)

If any confirmation were needed, last night’s packed gig at MITP underlines what has been obvious for the past couple of months: Brikkuni have become the first bona fide superstars of the Maltese alternative scene. Yesterday’s gig united virtually every subculture, from punks to indie kids and literati, under one roof, mixed in with curious casual observers checking out what all the fuss was about. The turnout wasn’t just impressive – I don’t think MITP has ever been quite so crowded, and it goes some way towards illustrating the impact Brikkuni have had on the local scene.

I realize I haven’t written about the album itself, though I don’t think much else needs to be said. That it’s the best piece of recorded music to ever come out of these islands has become a cliche, but it’s no less true for that – and nor should it be taken as damning with faint praise. I consider Kuntrabanda one of the albums of the year, irrespective of country of origin, and, in conjunction with this year’s also-excellent Areola Treat EP, it suggests that the time has come to stop thinking of local music as somehow handicapped or disadvantaged. Kuntrabanda may not be a perfect album, but it can hold its own with the best of them, and the reason isn’t just that it’s a polished, musically inventive, exciting piece of songcraft. What truly makes the album great – and, unfortunately, what makes it virtually unexportable – is that it recombines all the genetic traits of Maltese culture – band marches, ghanja, spaghetti westerns on late-night Sicilian channels – into a whole that seems both intimately familiar and thrillingly new. It’s like a shift of a few degrees in viewpoint that suddenly makes everything fall into place. Before Kuntrabanda – and I realize this is entirely a failing in my own make-up as a writer - I couldn’t imagine good music being made in Maltese, or any art – music, but also films or novels – so specifically Maltese in character. Now, anything seems possible.

This was Brikkuni’s first gig after the album launch; for the first time, their audience came to the show knowing the songs inside out. This couldn’t have been more obvious yesterday – every single one of the songs on Kuntrabanda has become an anthem. Familiarity hasn’t dulled the impact of these songs; rather, it has further energized the audience. Half the crowd was singing along from beginning to end, and the scorching, energetic set had the feel of a victory march – Brikkuni have won their place, now it’s time for the celebration. 

Among all the familiar songs, of course, a standout moment was the inclusion of the band’s first new post-Kuntrabanda song. If there’s anything to complain about in Kuntrabanda, it’s that Mario Vella’s lyrics too often fall back on bile, sarcasm and satire – it works, and it’s the basis of the most anthemic songs on the album, but it does give rise to the mistaken impression that Brikkuni are a Xtruppaw-like “joke” band, and I can’t help but wonder what Mario can do with more varied material. The newest addition to the repertoire at yesterday’s gig, “L-Ufficju”, suggests they’re on the right track – a mellow (by comparison) ballad that makes bittersweet poetry out of the daily grind, it’s an encouraging indication of a band attempting to widen their horizons and not resting on their laurels. I can’t wait to see where they go from here.

australia (baz luhrmann, 2008)

I’m a big, big fan of Luhrmann’s two previous films – Romeo + Juliet (1996) is not only the best film adaptation of the star-crossed lovers’ tale, but one of the best Shakespeare films in general, a heady pop-culture rush of breathless energy that seamlessly blends high and low culture to produce a film that is exciting, thrilling, tragic and alive. Moulin Rouge! (2001) was even better – an astonishing pantomime carnival of music, dance, colour, life and love, a manic display of kitchen-sink, throw-everything-at-the-screen, endlessly inventive filmmaking.

So what the hell happened with Australia? Apart from a (very, very) few moments, mostly in its okayish-I-guess first hour, Australia is precisely the sort of turgid, plodding, lifeless and uninspired “prestige” cinema that Luhrmann’s earlier films were such a refreshing antidote to. Where is all the energy, the wit, the visual imagination, the joie de vivre? Where is the never-pause-for-breath pace, the wit, the postmodern playing with genre, the fun?

Australia feels like Luhrmann behaving himself, wanting to show us he’s grown up, has put away childish things and is tackling Big, Important Themes. Racism! War!  Wait…maybe that didn’t come across clearly enough. RACISM! WAR! And rest assured that from the opening title cards explaining the background story of Australia’s “Stolen Generations” of aboriginal children to…well, the fade-out title cards talking about exactly the same thing, the film won’t let you forget for one second what it’s really about. There’s no avoiding the feeling that this is Luhrmann angling for a mantelpiece-ful of Academy Awards, reining in anything even remotely “edgy” about his film-making and aiming resolutely for the middlebrow – and it’s painful.

There are slight glimmers of hope in the first hour-and-a-half, which is where all the few recognizable hints of Luhrmann are concentrated. This section is basically a pop-buddy-Western, following the very English Lady Sarah Ashley and the very Australian Drover (Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, who both give in decent, if unremarkable, performances) in their quest to drive Lady Ashley’s herd of cattle to the port of Darwin before the evil cattle corporation can win the army contract.  There are a few decent moments of comedy, it moves along at a brisk pace, there are some diverting moments of excitement, one or two impressive shots, a romance, predictable character arcs, a happy ending, even a couple of sequences – I’m thinking especially of some early scenes in the Faraway Downs sequence – where Luhrmann’s former brilliance just about shines through. It’s hardly great, but it’s reasonable enough entertainment for ninety minutes – the kind of thing that would pass a lazy Sunday afternoon and be forgotten by the next day.

But wait! There’s more! Over an hour more, as it turns out, for once the film reaches this logical conclusion it just inexplicably starts again and keeps going on and on, bringing in the Japanese attack on Darwin and the forced deportation of half-caste children in a desperate effort for the film to justify its “epic” tag. Structurally, this puts the whole film out of balance – it feels like a half-decent film and its train-wreck, self-consciously “dark” sequel crammed into one movie. None of this latter part works well – narratively, it comes across as a series of increasingly outlandish coincidences and improbable circumstances, never gelling into anything coherent. The dramatic scenes are spectacularly mishandled and never steer far from the most hackneyed of cliches – most cringe-inducing is David Wenham’s comic-book caricature snarling baddie, a character who simply has no place in anything with even the remotest pretension to seriousness. The climactic Japanese attack, meanwhile, comes across as a third-rate, one-tenth-budget pastiche of Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001). Now when did I ever think I would be comparing Luhrmann unfavourably to Michael Bay?

Luhrmann has entirely jettisoned the rapid-cutting, frenetic montage style that was one of the most distinctive in contemporary cinema. The problem is that there’s nothing new to replace it, and all we get is a glossy, expensive-looking no-style, all soft focus, tourist-ad landscape shots and lingering sunsets. It’s artless, frequently clumsy and lacking in any substance. The landscapes look pretty enough but there isn’t even a hint of the eerie, spiritual majesty the Australian landscape acquires in, say, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1976), or even John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005), while there’s none of the weight or gravitas of the epic to replace Luhrmann’s usual levity and energy. More than anything, Australia is stylistically bland and entirely dull, which is the last thing anyone could have said of Luhrmann’s earlier filmography.

Where the suffocating blanket of dullness lifts momentarily, all that we glimpse is confusion. There are moments where the landscapes and backdrops are so blatantly artificial that they almost seem an intentional pastiche of the Golden Age of Hollywood studio epics that the film so desperately wants to be. This is reflected in the film as a whole, which occasionally ramps up the camp and suggests an entertaining, kitschy pastiche of the classical Hollywood epic struggling to get through. Now that’s a film that Luhrmann could have made great. It could have been the most joyous, grin-inducing film of the year.  Instead we have a schizophrenic film that constantly feels unsure of itself – too scared to tip itself all the way into camp, too ridiculous and fake to muster any real drama or emotion, it walks a barren middle ground where it’s neither one thing nor the other, just two and a half very, very long hours of grand, loud, bombastic, tedious, hollow nothing.

back…more or less (+ shameless plug)

Hi.

It’s been a while since my last post on here, for which I have no excuse apart from the old chestnut that other commitments/interests and life in general kind of got in the way. November disappeared in its entirety into the maw of a CELTA English-teaching course, December was taken up with screenwriting duties and festive preparations and, well, here we are.

I do intend to make posting here at least semi-regular (call it a slightly early New Year’s resolution) so, if anyone’s still checking in, I hope your patience will be amply rewarded.

I also want to take this opportunity to plug the newly-launched Schlock Magazine. It’s a WordPress-based monthly ezine featuring original fiction with a strongly pulp bias (if you’re not even slightly into horror, fantasy or sci-fi, it’s probably not for you.) It’s edited by my good friend Teodor Reljic, and (to declare my interest) the first issue, published this month, features (among many other excellent contributions) the first part of a story by yours truly.

Please do give it a look.

in bruges (martin mcdonagh, 2008)

Sometimes it’s nice to not get quite what you expected. I watched In Bruges expecting another post-Tarantino and post-Ritchie slice of self-conscious cool, all motor-mouthed hitmen engaging in witty pop-culture digressions and almost-slapstick bouts of graphic violence.

Now, there are elements of this in In Bruges. It is undeniably about a pair of comically mismatched hitmen, Ray and Ken (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson), who certainly engage in their fair share of witty banter as they lie low in the titular medieval Belgian city after a job in London has gone horribly wrong; and there is a fair amount of violence involved in the tale. Fundamentally, however, it is something very different. The humour (and In Bruges is a very, very funny film) is dry, desperate and often painful; it is the laugh of the doomed man who has nothing left to lose and drowns himself in the absurdity of it all. It is a momentary flicker of levity over murky depths of melancholy, ennui and moral crisis.

All of this centres around Colin Farrell, and his performance here, especially to someone who was never much of a fan of his, is a revelation. He has, to be fair, acquitted himself well in some films, notably The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005). But he has done nothing, to these eyes, that suggested the depths of talent he makes evident here. His Ray is a figure of painful vulnerability, conveying a sharp and consuming sadness in every look. He is a man inescapably haunted and tortured by crushing guilt, a manic-depressive prone to despondent brooding broken by sudden eruptions of excitement or violence.

In Bruges is a character study wrapped up in a morality play. Once we learn the nature of Ray’s sin and its repercussions, the comedy dies away, bringing the film’s true colours (accentuated by Carter Burwell’s excellent dirge-like score) to the fore.  It soon becomes evident that the choice of setting is far from arbitrary; the medieval environment, heavy with the memory of the Dark Ages, is the perfect backdrop for this tale of transgression and retribution. Ken and mob boss Harry (Ralph FIennes) arrange themselves on opposite sides of Ray’s Everyman as agents, respectively, of forgiveness and vengeance, New and Old Testament, and McDonagh loads both script and image with enough Christian symbolism to lend the film a sombre, portentous quality, without slipping into cliche or leaden allegory.The thematic fulcrum of the film is a scene where Ray and Ken view Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Last Judgement” in a gallery; Ray, defiantly unmoved by anything else he has seen in Bruges, is clearly stirred, and bares his soul, entering a heartfelt reverie on sin, guilt, atonement and judgement.

The painting’s fantastical imagery is glimpsed again, its monstrous figures erupting into garish life on the cobbled town streets, in the powerfully surreal climactic scene, where judgement finally falls on Ray. It’s a remarkably well-executed scene that culminates in an unexpected, simple yet potentially profound twist that demolishes the rigid morality play code of ethics in one fell swoop.

It’s remarkable how well In Bruges integrates its disparate elements into a whole that feels entirely natural and right. At its most sombre and allegorical, it remains riotously entertaining; at its most whimsically comic, it is nonetheless deeply melancholy. It’s a difficult balancing act, but the pay-off is one of the best films of the year to date, and a hugely promising debut for writer/director Martin McDonagh.

made out of babies – the ruiner (2008)

Illustrating the missing link between PJ Harvey’s early 90s output and the abrasive end of hardcore, Made out of Babies’ third album ranks as one of the most satisfyingly gruelling listens of the year. It’s difficult to say whether these songs would be compelling without Julie Christmas’ remarkable voice, but it’s irrelevant -her versatile cords are never far from the forefront.

To say that Christmas’ vocal range is impressive is an understatement. On opener “Cooker” alone, she delivers an almost Bjork-like warble that soars into a full-bodied, powerful tones before exploding into ragged, gut-wrenching screams. It is this ability to shift from contained tension to savage ferocity at the drop of a coin that colours this album’s jagged and unpredictable emotional register.

If the rest of the band’s contributions struggle to match the raw power of their attention-grabbing frontwoman, there is still plenty to admire. Musically, The Ruiner never veers too far from the hardcore formula – and perhaps it’s a slight occasional reliance on off-the-peg moshpit riffing that keeps the albums from the ranks of the truly great. Nonetheless, there is more than enough variety and impressive craft here to keep one’s interest – from the grandiose melodic tones of “Invisible Ink”, perhaps the most immediately palatable song here, to the taut tension and relentless drive of “Grimace” and the driving, violent rhythms of “Bunny Boots”, the latter matched by Christmas’ most histrionic performance. For a good proportion of the album, Made Out of Babies pull off the tricky combination of strong melodies with quasi-metal intensity and power; in their finest moments, the effect is staggering.

Ultimately, The Ruiner is going to put off as many people as it attracts. It’s too bleak, unsettling and ragged to be an addictive listen, and it does make for an exhausting forty-two minutes. Nonetheless its impact is undeniable, and, even if it’s just slightly let down by a (very) occasional slide into the cliches of the genre, it comes, on its own terms, close to greatness.

Made Out of Babies on MySpace

the witches (nicolas roeg, 1989/I)

I love 80s kiddie fantasy films, so I’ve been a bit late picking up on viewing this one…I was flipping through the appropriate nostalgia section of the DVD store with Daniel…Willow *check* The Dark Crystal *check* Never Ending Story *check* Labyrinth *check x 20+* etc…then we came across a film that is not only based on Roald Dahl’s “The Witches”, but also pairs the names Jim Henson and Nicolas Roeg…sounded like a geek-fest

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its creative team, often straining to balance a tone which seems to attempt to pull off Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) for kids. However, the implacable resilience of this approach is admirable, producing occasionally striking montages of grotesque imagery: low angles and extreme, defamiliarising close-ups of the witches’ faces and other revolting attributes. Particularly striking is the scene where the protagonist, Luke, is turned into a mouse…a scene which we witness through a series of successive first-person shots and drastic low-angles paired with trick photography and kaleidoscope camera movement. Unfortunately, the sugar rush produced by such moments is drowned amidst what appears to be an attempt to preserve as much of Dahl’s general “I’m an ever so cruel-evil-stinky-icky-poo-poo adult” dialogue as physically possible. In general, the need to preserve Dahl’s effective conspiracy with the child by making the serious and boring adult appear the villain is a move I understand and generally thoroughly enjoy, though here it results in audience unrest where what we really want is for Roeg to explode into the more visuals/less talk mode which we know from the masterpiece Don’t Look Now (1973).

Having said this, the black comedy is not completely lost, though it is generally more effective when it transgresses the realm of childhood conspiracy into adult terrain…it is at such moments, when the uneasy mixture of secondary school play dialogue and sleazy innuendo meet, that the film demonstrates the ability to disturb. Most notable in this respect is the scene where Dahl’s greedy-boy archetype Bruno Jenkins is lured into a meeting hall full of witches by the promise of six bars of chocolate, where he will act as guinea pig to a formula which turns children into mice. Amidst a sea of cackling witches disguised as little British old ladies from the RSPCC, Bruno edges closer to the platform where we see the stern and black-satin clad grand high witch (Anjelica Huston) in a medium-shot as she repeatedly thrusts her hips and bites her lower lip, the anticipation appearing to mime masturbation. The reference is misleading enough to pass for general villainous behaviour and slide past the rating board, but the take lasts a few seconds too long for comfort, and reveals Roeg’s talent for winking at the adult over directing exclusively for the child.

Returning to Rosemary’s Baby time and again, the film not only betrays its debt to the classic horror film, but also strives to adapt the most grotesque moments to a children’s film. As previously mentioned, this doesn’t always work due to a swamping amount of dialogue, though the thematic material it borrows does: we have the horror residing inside an innocuous-looking three star hotel in Britain, the sadistic hatred directed at the young by the embittered, and the effective parody of the ambitious middle-class who are duped or reveal their own corruption. In this way, as an adaptation, the film tries for a faithful rendering of a Dahl universe replete with yapping social climbers, grotesque villains and whinging minor characters who converge inside one rather grotty but pretentious British sea-side hotel. The combination is not at all uninteresting, with Rowan Atkinson playing the fumbling hotel manager, as well as a couple of scenes in the kitchen which seem like precursors to the recent Ratatouille (Brad Bird/Jan Pinkava, 2007)…

Overall however, the film often feels like a Jean Pierre Jeunet film in progress, but because of the compromise between its direction and the ratings board, it never fully lives up to its apparent scope. Moreover, what appears to be a hideous post-dub often renders the ample dialogue noxiously unbearable, and presents us with a loss of lip-synch and cast of whinging voices which we’d find only moderately acceptable in an English dub of a foreign language film (think along the lines of the English dub of City of Lost Children (Marc Caro/ Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1995), which I had the misfortune of experiencing).

Finally, if you’re into 80s/early 90s kids’ films you might enjoy the very fact of its uneven tone as an authentic feature of the period…it’s not among the best, but it has its individual iconic moments.

the mummy: tomb of the dragon emperor (rob cohen, 2008)

It’s been a pretty good summer blockbuster season. Even without the towering achievement of The Dark Knight, we’ve had some truly great films (WALL-E), some very very good ones (Hellboy II: The Golden Army), and some less-great but still thoroughly enjoyable offerings (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man). All of which makes the crushing mediocrity of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor even harder to excuse.

Now, The Mummy (Stephen Sommers, 1999) was pretty damn far from what you would call good cinema, but, call it a guilty pleasure if you must, it was good, trashy fun – melding two delightfully old-fashioned genres (the B-movie horror film and the adventure serial), with modern CG spectacle. The Mummy Returns (2001) kinda sucked overall, but it had its moments, and in its better sequences it retained the energy and wit of its predecessor. The law of diminishing returns, however, is in full swing here: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is a near-worthless conveyor-belt product, joylessly going through the motions of the series and hoping a change of scenery (China instead of Egypt) will disguise the onset of rigor mortis.

There is nothing interesting, inventive or entertaining about this film, and in no part does it work well. The action takes far too long to get started, and instead, for the first half-hour or so, we’re regaled with a re-introduction to the protagonists, Rick and Evelyn O’Connell (the latter now played by Maria Bello – generally a talented and dependable actress, but here seeming bored throughout). These early scenes are played for broad comedy, but, as with all the numerous attempts at humour in the film, this falls flat. Every trite and unfunny one-liner is lingered over with nudge-wink emphasis, and none succeeds in raising as much as an amused half-smile. Also disappointing is the lack of the chemistry and witty interplay between Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz  – every scene Fraser and Bello share feels lifeless and forced, making the early scenes focusing on their relationship a chore to sit through.

Once the action finally starts, however, you start to wish it hadn’t. Rob Cohen (of The Fast and the Furious and XXX fame) directs these scenes with his trademark uninspired rapid-cutting and shaky camerawork. It’s impossible to figure out exactly what is going on, and impossible to care, because none of the numerous action sequences that make up the whole of the film’s second half offer anything interesting or memorable. More damningly, there’s never the slightest sense of peril or real danger – the lazy plotting means that, again and again, at the moment when the situation threatens to get out of hands, the O’Connells are miraculously saved by some nick-of-time deus ex machina – an ancient magical weapon no-one bothered to mention before, some sub-clause in the unwieldily complicated web of spells surrounding the undead emperor, etcetera. Most jarringly, the good guys are rescued from a battle in the Himalayas that is starting to look hopeless by a gang of Yetis that suddenly show up out of nowhere to do the rescuing and then, just as suddenly, disappear. This happens not once, but twice in the space of five minutes, after which the fluffy protectors go back to wherever the hell they came from and are never spoken of again. This sort of anything-goes plotting is the worst trap a fantasy-tinged narrative can fall into, and it’s inexcusable.

The sheer lack of ideas and facile plotting make themselves most evident when the film resorts to simply lifting scenes from earlier (better) movies. One of the central set-pieces, a brawl in a Shanghai nightclub and a subsequent car chase through the brightly-lit streets of the city, doesn’t even try to hide its plagiarism of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984) – to follow it up with a flight to the Himalayas in a rickety, livestock-laden cargo plane is just insulting.

Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. then, is neither funny, nor thrilling, nor entertaining in the slightest. It’s rarely painful to watch – it’s at least competent – but it is terminally boring, fatally uninteresting and completely forgettable. If anything, it puts Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull into focus – while it was inevitably a disappointment in the light of its unimpeachable predecessors, it had character, ideas and a film-making verve that Tomb of the Dragon Emperor cannot even dream of. Digging up the Mummy franchise a third time was clearly inadvisable – this corpse has started to rot. Perhaps it’s time to lay it to rest for good.

hellboy II: the golden army (guillermo del toro, 2008)

The most auteurist (in the original sense of the word) of major contemporary filmmakers strikes again. Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a film that could not have been made by anyone else but Guillermo Del Toro. Every bit as much as Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), it is a parade of Del Toro’s recurring obsessions: the coexistence and interplay of the real world and the mythic/supernatural world, the influence of a forgotten past breaking into the present, clockwork figures and contraptions, tree, root and branch imagery, and a procession of weird and wonderful supernatural or monstrous figures

Del Toro paints his second Hellboy story on a much wider canvas than his first. Where Lovecraftian cosmic horror was the reference point in the first film, here it is Tolkienesque epic fantasy, with allusions abounding to a past age where elves, trolls and goblins lived alongside humankind.  Despite the mythic depths this opens onto, however, Hellboy II is not The Dark Knight. Although it leavens its knowing, tongue-in-cheek irony with moments of genuine wonder and poetry (or perhaps that should be the other way round), this is a film that is gleeful, riotous fun first of all. Hellboy does most of his communicating with his big handgun and his even bigger red stone right hand, and the story never wanders far from the next thrilling, no-holds-barred fight.

There is a lot in Hellboy II that works wonderfully. As with the first film, the cast of lovably endearing characters that make up the BPRD – Hellboy himself (Ron Perlman, as perfect as ever), Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) and newcomer Johan Krauss (voiced by Seth MacFarlane) are the film’s heart and soul, and they are faultlessly judged in their very human foibles and hang-ups (Krauss perhaps comes off the worst, acting as little more than uncomplicated comic relief, but he is very effective comic relief, so that’s not really much of an issue). These are characters you care for, with the result that the two romantic relationships that underpin the film emotionally – predictable as they are – are affecting and involving. This also means that one of the best moments in the film – Hellboy and Abe’s drunken singalong to Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You” – is cute, sympathetic and amusing where it could have been trite and corny.

As always with Del Toro’s films, the interlocking of the real and the fantastical worlds is perfectly judged. In this regard, Hellboy II is even more Del Toro-esque than the original, conjuring up a mystical shadow-world of fairies, elves and trolls existing in the dark and hidden places of the world that reflects the most enduring images of faerie lore and folk-tales.

The narrated prologue explaining the origin of the Golden Army (framed as a bedtime story told to a young Hellboy, and brilliantly visualized through toy-like make-believe figures) strongly recalls the prologue of The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), and achieves a similar level of mythic grandeur. It’s an astonishing scene and a perfectly-judged opening, and it’s far from the only standout sequence. The forest god Prince Nuala unleashes on Hellboy (and Manhattan) about halfway through the film is a richly-imagined creation, and is responsible for the most strikingly beautiful scene in the film – a scene which, like the forest god itself, owes much to the pantheistic poetry of the Miyazaki of Princess Mononoke (1997). And this is only one of the delightfully inventive and gorgeously-imagined fantastical encounters and scenes that populate the film. The troll market, for instance, is the cantina scene from Star Wars (1977) by way of 1980s fantasy, a rich cornucopia of wondrous creatures filling every corner of the frame. And the encounter with the Angel of Death (one of the most riveting creations of Del Toro’s career, and that’s saying something) approaches the intensity and power of the best moments of Pan’s Labyrinth.

There is, then, a lot in Hellboy II, and most of it is great, and a lot of it brilliant. But it often feels like there is too much, and little of it is allowed space to breathe. The moment a scene starts digging its claws into you and dragging you somewhere wonderful, the film cuts to something else – something equally interesting, or entertaining, or awe-inspiring, but then that’s gone too just as you start getting involved in it. It’s not exactly that the film feels rushed, more that it seems like too many disparate strands and moods are squeezed into too small a space. The pacing problems therefore spill over into tonal issues; the appeal of Hellboy – in print and celluloid form – has always been the seamless blending of seemingly incongruous themes and cultural references, but here the seams start to show. Hellboy II will often move from mythic to a slapstick-inflected punch-up, to a tender romantic interlude. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle, but, while all the individual scenes are, almost invariably, great, they don’t always gel as well as they should, with the result that Hellboy II sometimes feels like less than the sum of its (impressive) parts.

There is another issue with the film, and it’s to do with the narrative structure of the series as a whole. Fundamentally, in Hellboy II we don’t learn anything new about Hellboy or any of the other members of the BPRD. No overarching story is progressed or developed; in fact, the whole film has the feel of an episode in a TV series – a stand-alone, self-contained adventure is set up and resolved, but, apart from a couple of minor plot points, everything stays the same, ready for the next episode. This does have the advantage of making the film perfectly comprehensible for newcomers in a way that, say, the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean films weren’t, but you can’t help but wish Del Toro had been just a little more ambitious with his plotting for the series as a whole.

All of this probably sounds more negative than my impression of Hellboy II actually was. On a level of pure entertainment it beats just about anything else this summer, and there is rare imaginative brilliance and film-making skill in its finest moments. It is a film I will undoubtedly watch (and enjoy) again and again, but it is a film that disappointingly falls short of the greatness that lies within its grasp.

teeth (mitchell lichtenstein, 2007)

I had heard about Teeth a while back but I wasn’t holding my breath about it coming to Malta…so after its completely unexpected release in a local cinema last week (the release actually turned out to be a week after its announcement, but anyway…), I rushed off to watch it.

A couple of the inept local reviewers have received it very poorly, with as much ignorance and bitter dismissiveness as you’d generally expect…but Teeth, to anyone familiar with its blend of tones and genres, will ring as an instant cult classic.

The basic plot is simple, and without a viewing, it is difficult to persuade anyone who isn’t into horror films that it’s worth a watch: In a little back-water town over-run by a mix of fanatically Christian teens and violent eccentrics, the protagonist Dawn O’Keefe (Dawn of the teeth?) struggles with issues of religious purity and abstinence. After battling with the unconscious knowledge that her fear of sex is due to her possession of the mythical “vagina dentata”, she finally launches into a semi-quest to discover the nature of her own sexuality and possibly, her feminist purpose. See what I mean? Because of the plot level, the film is simply difficult to justify…

However, Lichtenstein’s delivery of his script is a completely different story, offering an unnerving and mildly surreal treatment of the horror/coming of age combination. After a rough calculation, I’ve drawn up an approximate formula for the whole…ask Richard Kelly and Dario Argento to co-write the script, then get Sophia Coppola and David Lynch to co-direct it, while of course channelling the spirit of Angela Carter in order to tell them where to feminist it up in an appropriately merciless way…and you have something like Teeth.

Because of this, the fact that the film often panders to the film buff’s taste is not a secret from the opening sequence, though it never deters from the overall impressiveness of Lichtenstein’s innovative mixture of main influences. In a Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001) like moment, the film opens on a gloriously exciting note as the camera ominously pans across a landscape featuring two prominent nuclear power plant towers. These smoke away to a Lynchian rumble pumped up by a stressed B-movie style chord. Slow pan and zoom into a mundane suburban scene featuring a flashback which forms a key plot device, and the scene is set for an odd ride into an indie coming of age movie.

In-keeping with Lichtenstein’s family legacy, Teeth’s development proves self-consciously postmodern as it continuously blends pop artefacts with mythological references: a giant 50s B-movie scorpion from a late night feature repeatedly interrupts Dawn’s sexual fantasies, while icons like the nuclear plant towers replace monuments of fertility as the film continues to playfully conflate phallic and yonic imagery. Most impressive of these scenes is probably a travelling interior shot of a half-submerged cave bearing rows of dangling stalactites, the mood rendered both ethereal and sinister by pools of reflected light and a continuously excellent and unpredictable soundtrack.

Teeth’s strength admittedly lies more in its power as a coming of age story than a horror film, given that it is at its best when retro horror imagery is used to signify and emphasise the stammering awkwardness and barely suppressed hormones of its characters. Particularly striking is Jess Weixler’s performance as the neurotic Dawn, whose suppressed hysteria is amplified through disjunctive editing and a film stock which shifts between soft documentary-like grain and vivid, sharp daydream moments. Linking it to Saved (Brian Dannelly, 2004), the film also toys heavily with the moral claustrophobia evoked by Christian teen organisations. However, this isn’t the clumsy but well-meaning community of Saved, and as Dawn ekes out the most painfully awkward catchphrases about a campaign for virginity called ‘The Promise’ to a choral flock of village of the damned style pre-teens, the film possibly reaches one of its highest peaks…for anyone raised in a heavily Christian community, these scenes will ring in an eerily accurate tone.

Once the tone shifts into slasher mode, there is a considerable loss in mood and the endearing nature of the teen angst which had been developing for a large part of the running time is somewhat lost. The transition however appears calculated; Dawn is transformed along with glossier visuals and the unnervingly ambiguous motivation behind every character’s actions which had been so effective throughout is also abandoned.

By the end, the movie is decidedly pop-feminist, somewhere on the verge of launching into Tarantino’s “I’m so going to kick your ass you sick bastard!” ending to Deathproof (2007). That every man in the film is either charicaturely evil, shady or ineffectual might be a point for scepticism, but this factor is easily outnumbered by an infinite supply of misogynistic crap which passes for both Freudian tinged art house and mainstream horror. Overall, it is refreshing to watch such a quirky, original film which centers around a female protagonist, representing both the sardonic and erotic details of everyday life with intrigue and a dollop of black humour.

Worth a watch, especially for anyone into cult, indie geek and genre-bending horror Also, watch out for the scariest old guy ever caught on film….