Archive for the ‘Expounding on Film’ Category

Make ‘Em Cry Scriptwriting with Julian Fellowes; or, Why I Love Carson

February 20, 2013

DowntonAbbey1

Alright. Wipe your eyes. It’s not too soon to discuss this.

“You know this is a soap opera, right?” my husband Lala said that time he watched five minutes of Masterpiece Theater’s “Downton Abbey.”

“Yes,” I said.

Sometimes my South African husband calls British period dramas “racist” just because they’re wall-to-wall white people. I used to protest, but then again, that was pretty much the same reason I scoffed at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

But Lala says it’s ok because these dramas – also known as “your English crap” – are my heritage. He’s right – my mom’s dad’s family is British and many of my distant relatives live in England today.

I won’t lie – I haven’t missed an episode of the entire series (written by Julian Fellowes), whose season three finale just aired in the US a few days ago.

For the uninitiated, the show is about the fictional Earl of Grantham and his family and staff, who live on a massive estate in early 20th-century Yorkshire. The story follows the insufferable entitlements, infighting and romances of the noble Crawley family, and the below-decks machinations of their (mostly) loyal servants. It’s worth watching just for the glorious costumes.

I’m going to continue now; if you’re not familiar with the show, I will neither entreat you to watch nor explain the plot and characters further – feel free to ditch this post if you haven’t already, and come back next time (I promise the blog isn’t becoming a TV rehash zone).

Does anyone else wish that Mr. Swire had kept his money in the family? I really would have enjoyed watching the Crawleys sell out and move to a smaller house, which, as Lord Grantham dolefully points out, would require a staff of just eight.

Imagine living with only eight servants.

The fact that I actually felt sorry for Lord Grantham is the biggest reason I hate to love Downton Abbey.

Besides, as the Crawleys bemoaned the imminent loss of their ancestral home, wondering what their identity could possibly amount to without Downton Abbey, I couldn’t help thinking that if their home is an abbey, it’s only belonged to Lord Grantham’s forebears since Henry VIII dismantled England’s Catholic institutions to enrich himself and his allies. Talk about rightful ownership.

Season three had a goodly shock for us midway through, when we lost the saint-like Lady Sybil to eclampsia. She was mourned as one of Downton Abbey’s best-loved characters, but to me, she was also one of the least interesting.

Lady Sybil

I understand about actors departing and all, but Sybil’s dabbling in progressive politics had been eclipsed by her chaste, patient and wholly disinterested romance (disinterested in the Austen sense, you know what I mean), and then Tom Branson joined the Crawley fold without bloodshed. Other than that scandalous Aladdin-pants incident, Sybil was goodness itself, and the only other drama her character could conceivably create (no pun intended) was to die in childbirth.

Besides, if you ask me, Anna Bates has the steady, uncomplicated angel vibe covered, along with her limping, faithful, crinkly-eyed husband.  In a true soap opera, there’s only so much room for these types.

Now blow your nose – we’re coming to it.

All of Edith’s lovers are desperately affable yet unavailable middle-aged men. But have you noticed that everyone who hits the sheets with Mary ends up dead?

Yes, Matthew survives WWI and the Spanish flu, recovers from paralysis and (surely worst of all) the threat of inheriting a smaller house with only eight servants, only to die in a freak car accident just after his wife gives birth to a son.

Hearts stopped all over the world as season three ended with a wide-eyed Matthew crushed beneath his car, blood pooling out of his ear.

Hanging was too good for Fellowes.

Women expressed grief at Matthew’s death as if he was a real person – except worse, because with real grief, much as we’d often like to lay blame somewhere, even if it’s God, there’s really no point when it comes to truly coping with death. But in this case, we can rail against actor Dan Stevens, who refused to renew his contract for the tacked-on season four, or writer Julian Fellowes, who (perhaps in a fit of pique over losing this golden boy) devised a graceless, gruesome death as clichéd as it was shocking.

I’ve been doing my best to process this in the twenty-four hours since I watched the episode, and you may hate me for this, but I think it’s the Sybil syndrome all over again.

Yes, Matthew’s blue eyes were more beautiful than glaciers lost to global warming, and his voluminous blond bangs were so well-sculpted that Alfred, had his arm grown tired, could’ve rested a dish of hollandaise sauce on them. But the only thing bigger than Matthew’s torch for Mary was his moral fortitude. Now that the whole thing with Lavinia and the inheritance was put to rest, how much blissful connubial nuzzling could one audience take?

Many people knew some kind of demise for Matthew was in the works. News had broken of the actor leaving the series before the final episode aired in the US, but I was totally out of the loop.

I still knew Matthew was going to bite the dust, though.

The first clue was the end of the penultimate episode of season three. Lord Grantham joyously embraces his two sons-in-law on the cricket green in a closing scene more sticky and golden than the jar of honey in my cabinet.

Fellowes couldn’t have spelled it out any clearer: he was about to break our hearts.

The second clue was Matthew’s season three dialogue.

When Matthew wasn’t declaring his undying love for his wife every time they turned back the sheets, he was sticking up for Edith, Tom, the whole Downton estate, and that new floozy, Cousin Rose.

When Mary gave birth to a son, Matthew was so happy he felt as if he’d “swallowed a box of fireworks.”

Some commentators argued that Fellowes punished Dan Stevens with the nature of Matthew’s death because the actor had the gall to leave the hit show. But if the writer really was trying to stick it to Stevens, I think the best evidence is the truckload of sappy lines that characterized Matthew in season three.

Fellowes knew that such a stream of unadulterated goodness and progressive wisdom could only be matched by our tears.

But I’m willing to forgive him, because of my favorite moment in the final episode.

“Downton is safe,” Mary sighs as she cradles the estate’s new heir. The entire family is likewise in raptures because her baby doesn’t have a vagina. But Carson, the butler, a terminal traditionalist and the biggest snob in the building, loves Mary so much that when he gets news of the birth by phone, he’s the only one in town who completely forgets to ask if it was a boy or a girl.

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The Artist: The Best New Old Movie of All Time?

February 6, 2012

Even my smartest friends are in raptures over The Artist. Since it’s being hailed as possibly the best movie of all time since those newfangled talkies hit the screen, I marched myself to a matinee at the local one-screen community theater up the street. Having racked up Oscar nominations for everything from its actors and directing to Film Editing, Score and Costume Design (nine in all), never mind that the film is mostly silent – I’m surprised they didn’t just throw best Sound Editing in too.

The look of the opening credits put me right on the couch with my beloved Grampa, who enjoys nothing more than a good Deanna Durbin musical of the 1930’s. On Grampa’s movie nights, young ladies and their fathers would do anything for each other. There’s a lot of music and tearful hugging (he also loves old Little House on the Prairie episodes).

Deanna Durbin in One Hundred Men and a Girl.

The unquestioned devotion of a young woman for an older man is a theme of The Artist, too. There’s a pinch of romance, and lots of gazing out car windows while tears drip down in concert with the rain. And a pretty cute dog.

Nice cars are nothing when your friends are unhappy.

Silent movie star George Valentin (the perfectly cast Jean Dujardin) rules the movie biz of the late 1920’s. The      audience of Obama’s November 2008 acceptance speech has nothing on the 1927 audience at the premiere of Valentin’s latest epic. His impeccably trained terrier is the perfect onstage appendage as Valentin soaks in the crowd’s adulation, shamelessly upstaging his co-star (the impish Missi Pyle).  Throngs of female fans love him almost as much as his own wife detests him (how nice that these marital debacles were limited to Hollywood’s earliest era).

A chance encounter in front of the cameras with Valentin vaults young, beautiful autograph seeker Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) from the shrieking female masses to the front pages, and with the media savvy of a Kardashian matriarch, she lands herself a once-in-a-lifetime audition. It’s not long before Peppy and Valentin reunite onset, and, illuminated by the fresh-faced Bejo’s delicious smile, romance sparkles before the day is over.

But as Peppy’s star rises, Valentin meets the advent of talking pictures with fruity guffaws. Deserted by his studio approximately three minutes later, he wagers everything, Shyamalan-style, on writing, directing, producing and starring in a new silent film adventure which flops just in time for the Great Depression.

Valentin trades his palatial home for a grimy apartment and settles into a self-pitying stupor of booze and cigarettes.  The pawnshop shrugs over his snazziest things, and his only human comfort is the melancholic warmth of a faithful chauffeur (James Cromwell), unless you count the laser-like devotion of his little dog (and audiences calling for a canine Oscar nomination probably would). To a bombastic score, Valentin’s bar-slumping, ambling-around-town gloom drags on for what feels like most of the film (curiously, his pencil mustache endures to perfection, however dissolute the rest of him becomes).

The 'stache is impervious to any misfortune.

The florid and fiery crescendo arrives as the artist’s despair leads to the unthinkable, which we’ve been waiting for all along.

But throughout it all, apparently on the strength of a few giddy dances and a sweet dressing-room exchange, Peppy tirelessly attends to Valentin’s welfare, and secures a second chance for him.

With all of the conventions of a sentimental show-biz narrative intact – the pain of being eclipsed in an oh-so-fickle world, slavish devotion (from both the canine and the human female), the tender artist’s risk of self-destruction, the balm of restored notoriety, and a rousing dance number – everyone is in raptures over how fresh and lovely the film is.

A lot of critics loved this film, but here I’ll just point to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s own Stephen Rea, who raves that the film is “vital and new”.

“Strangely, wonderfully,” he continues, “The Artist feels as bold and innovative a moviegoing experience as James Cameron’s bells-and-whistles Avatar did a couple of years ago. Retro becomes nuevo. Quaint becomes cool.”

It must be because writer/director Michel Hazanavicius  has created a black-and-white, almost completely silent film for a twenty-first century audience, with only the most necessary dialogue revealed in old-fashioned placards. John Goodman, afforded almost no subtitles in the role of the classic cigar-puffing agent, may be worth the price of admission just for his soundless expressions of thoroughly disgruntled acquiescence.  The cast shines and the sets are irresistible.

Especially for a relative youngster like me – and, I admit it, hardly a film aficionado – watching a brand-new silent film does elicit an enjoyable kind of verbal suspense and attunement that’s lacking in modern films. “Our screen senses are heightened,” Rea says. “We take in the actors, their motions and emotions, more keenly. The music hits our ears differently, more deeply.” But for me, the throwback novelty of the film’s silent landscape does nothing to heighten the protagonists’ emotional appeal or motivations.

Before we spend at least a third of the film on Valentin’s piteous degradation, we know nothing about him except that he lives for applause and is insufferably conceited, embracing a trained dog more often than his wife. His patrician smolder, however poignant, seems like a poor basis to root for the resurrection of his career, and the reasons for Peppy’s redeeming fidelity to Valentin are unclear, beyond the happy female trope that kept dear little Deanna scheming adorably on behalf of the down-and-out men in her onscreen lives.

Nope. I still don't care.

Of course The Artist’s setting is ripe for references to the modern scramble of the media in the digital age, as the public’s entertainment consumption evolves by the minute. But by now these themes hardly seem any newer than the storytelling conventions of the 1930’s.

Who knows how the art of film will change over the next century? Who knows what we’ll be nostalgic for in another seventy years? Perhaps someone will produce, say, an adventure movie in which a hero with a gritty past must battle aliens hungry for Earth’s resources until someone discovers that infiltrating the mother-ship is the key to it all. The film, full of explosions and fiery, slimy computerized effects, will be shown on a flat screen in 2-D, and the passage of time will render the one-dimensional hero and simplistic plot refreshing and poignant.

The Artist is a beautifully-made, often pleasurable film. But its endearingly old-fashioned quality, from its slew of narrative clichés to its silent-film gimmick, hardly adds up to the best film of year.

What do you think?

If you think I’m a total philistine for shrugging over this New York Film Critics Circle Award Best Picture, by all means, weigh in.

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In Which We Discuss Harry Potter : an updated re-post in honor of our goodbye to Hogwarts

July 17, 2011

Instead of picking up some quality literature and engaging with the themes and content of real life, kids and teenagers (yea, even infantilized adults) have immersed themselves in a puerile, shoddily written fantasy world of wands and broomsticks, dragons and spells and wizards, all ready-made for a fantastically lucrative film franchise. You might think that any BOOK a kid is willing to READ (in this age of earphone and video-game appendages) should be viewed as a heaven-sent gateway to more reading, as if it’s worth allowing your kids to consume this nonsense because it might lead them to open a real book in the future. But literary critics have been known to consign Potter to the rubbish bin.

So say the Harry Potter Snobs. If you’re a Harry Potter Snob, let me fill you in on a few key facts before we proceed.

If you want to talk about worthwhile themes for tweens and teens, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are pretty high on the list. Friendship, bravery and loyalty pull HP and friends through year after year. The whole series revolves around the defeat of one uber-bad wizard’s goal of wiping out those he deems inferior and impure – in Rowling’s world, non-magical “muggles” and “mud-blood” wizards who have muggles in their family tree. Rowling underscores the equality/diversity theme by emphasizing international and interracial friendships and romances.

One of my favorite novels in the series is number five, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”. Rowling takes pains to avoid reducing the story to simplistic good and evil. With the introduction of the sadistic Dolores Umbridge and her fearful, incompetent Ministry of Magic cronies, the author dwells on complicated conflicts, pointing out that ignorance, denial and selfish ambition can be just as dangerous as outright malevolence.  In “Order of the Phoenix”, a newly angry, isolated 15-year-old Harry feels a treacherous mental and emotional proximity to his nemesis, Lord Voldemort,  as if his usual qualities are coming unmoored in favor of a dark new presence. It’s a great metaphor for the difficulties of adolescence, when bizarre new urges, influences and feelings bombard the growing teen, volatile emotions giving way to the conviction that no-one, especially staid, authoritative adults, can fathom what you’re going through.

And do we need to mention the irresistible etymological wordplay of the novels’ spells and names? If HP readers ever take Latin, they’ll have a leg up.

Why hate HP? That being said, respect for the HP novels should not mean an obsession with the denizens of Hogwarts. There are many reasons to take Rowling’s exalted talents with a slightly snooty grain of salt.

Critics who attack her pedestrian, repetitive prose have a point. I’m all for an aptly placed adverb, but Rowling sows some pretty hefty ones as if she senses an opportunity, outside of her role as storyteller, to seed young minds with fancy words. Because why else would you write that Crabbe and Goyle “laughed sycophantically”, unless you wanted your young reader to glean new vocab from the context? As a piece of description, you can’t get any less original. On its own, in a typical context, a $10 adverb does not an interesting sentence make.

I enjoyed the HP books. That doesn’t mean I don’t have some serious questions, though. For example, in The Goblet of Fire, I always wondered: if Barty Crouch Jr. (disguised as Professor Moody) wanted to serve Harry up to Lord Voldemort through a portkey, why the heck didn’t he just make it Harry’s fork or textbook? Why does he bewitch the Goblet of Fire and mentor Harry at great personal risk through the Triwizard Tournament in hopes that Harry will be first to grab the Cup? There are just so many variables – like Cedric and Harry, painfully noble, reaching the Cup together.  But just as Voldemort always waxes lyrical about Harry’s death before Harry defeats him, I guess the Dark Arts must be done with style – flashy, questionable strategies be damned.

As for Hermione Granger, I’d like to know what she has against Divination. She finds it, if I recall correctly, a “very woolly discipline”, far too ethereal and subjective for her concrete, practical tastes. But don’t you think that’s just a bit rich coming from a girl who can conjure birds out of thin air?

And Dumbledore, how did you get the reputation for such sound judgment? Granted, you do say that since you’re more intelligent than everyone else, your mistakes are “correspondingly huger”, but come on. Ignoring Voldemort’s early dark tendencies, you provided him with a top magical education and his first opportunities in evil recruitment.  And really, I’m shocked by your abysmal estimation of potential faculty. You hire Quirrell (who happens to have Voldemort growing out of the back of his head – one of the more surreal moments of late 20th-century children’s lit), Lockhart (a devious, inept charlatan), Lupin (a werewolf who almost takes out your favorite students), Mad-Eye Moody (whom you failed to notice was actually a deadly criminal in disguise), and Slughorn (who taught young Voldemort how murders could be the key to eternal life, and then lied about it to cover his behind). This is not to mention the near-fatal Hogwarts basilisk incident. And if you really wanted Harry to stay out of trouble, you would have confiscated that Invisibility Cloak in Book One. Dumbledore clearly has tenure, because if he were an American muggle professor, even the teachers’ unions would be howling for his dismissal.

Despite their fantastic abilities, Dumbledore’s Hogwarts charges seem steeped in an almost medieval ignorance. Somehow I don’t think “History of Magic” covers the Norman Conquest, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the American Revolution or the Boer War. Hogwarts students learn how to transfigure animals (although why you’d need to transform an animal into an inanimate object is beyond me, unless, instead of throwing the TV Guide at the yowling cat as my father was wont to do, you could simply turn the offending feline into a nice quiet magazine), but do they learn any modern languages? Do they study grammar or literature? What about geography? They might take Care of Magical Creatures and Herbology, but do they learn about Adenosine Triphosphate, photosynthesis, the Periodic Table, or evolution?

Those who want to ban poor HP on grounds of witchcraft probably would not mind Hogwarts’ scientific omissions. The anti-Darwin league would probably also get behind Hogwarts’ apparent lack of any sex-ed curriculum – a potential problem, given all the snogging in books 5 and 6. Could Molly Weasley, shocked and horrified by the concept of muggle medicine, master the biology behind the appearance of her and Arthur Weasley’s large, red-headed brood? Because I doubt she learned about gametes and genetics at Hogwarts.

I don’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of HP with my questions. These queries are ill-applied to fantasy novels. There’s a reason I never have, and probably never will, publish fiction (unless you count press releases and playbill articles, but those aren’t so much fiction as drivel based on the truth, a genre at which I excel). Nobody would want to hear about Ron’s Geology presentation, Hermione’s Spanish exam, Harry’s paper on Samuel Beckett, or the birds and the bees at the Weasleys’. What would “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” be without Harry in the Triwizard Tournament, glaring plot device or not? So having said my piece, I subside. I think the Harry Potter Snobs are frustrated people who wish they could have sold 15 million copies of their book in just 24 hours. Long life to The Boy Who Lived.

I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 yesterday, and popcorn stands were set up inside the auditoriums themselves, presumably because if everyone seeing Harry Potter bought their popcorn at the regular counter, it would be swamped. Partway through the movie I took my eyes off the screen and looked over the huge, packed theater of all races and ages. The single cell phone that rang during the movie was quickly silenced. I hope you’re all enjoying your goodbyes to Harry Potter.

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The Truth About E.T.

February 28, 2011

Between a fish’s bone shaped like the crucifixion, an unopened set of twenty-year-old Pac-Man erasers, and a lapel pin embossed with the words “New Jersey and You”, my mother picked up a squat, brown plush figure with blue plastic eyes.  A visit to your parents can mean a respite from life’s adult worries – or it can be a resurrection of your most childish fears. “Oh, look, you guys!” Mom said, holding out the toy. “Your favorite!” My brother and I froze.

I had joined my mom and younger brother, Brad, on their weekly trip to the local auction house. As the auctioneer’s assistant, hidden by the press of bidders, hoisted the objects high, it seemed as if the coin cases, antique model trucks, and cut-glass decanters were crowd surfing at a nostalgia concert. Brad combed through the laden tables, gauging eBay resale values like a bloodhound on the scent.  I wondered who had stored these things in their homes, why the stuff had ended up at auction, and who in the crowd would be moved to give that “Family Ties” board game a new home. There were dusty oil paintings, an African wood carving, Ford and Coca-Cola memorabilia, a box of faux-jewel-studded broaches in the shape of giraffes, and a child’s ID badge from the 1965 World’s Fair. Petrified sharks’ teeth vied with weathered, amorphous civil war bullets, and tarnished candle-sticks straight from a haunted mansion presided over a stack of ragged three-foot dolls, limbs entwined in baleful bewilderment. I became engrossed in a book about Lucille Ball while my mother bid on a teacup painted with dogwood blossoms, my husband hovered over a camera from the 1950’s, and Brad amassed a box of autographed sports photos and a remote-control car.

There was something for everyone, in other words. But, as our mother very well knew, the detritus of a thousand attics, dining room cabinets and outgrown bedrooms will always harbor just as many things that are not for everyone.

I have to back up a bit to explain why the brown toy made our blood run cold. Please come with me from the auction house to the video store (or, nowadays, a nice Netflix session). Just like the auction tables, a buffet of movies reveals the endless variety of human tastes. Whether it’s inspirational racehorses, Katherine Heigl playing a buttoned-up woman in need of a roguish man to loosen her up, or hard-bitten young women trussing and torturing their former abusers, we can all find something we’re in the mood to rent. However, each of us can also find something we’d never watch in a hundred years.

Though my taste in movies is broad and eclectic (I like watching Lizzy confront Lady Catherine De Bourgh as much as I like it when Ripley duels the grand bitch alien of them all) there is a goodly list of things I just won’t watch. Movies set on submarines are out because I’m too claustrophobic to enjoy them, and, in my mind, a story set on a submarine has a substantially higher risk of incurring another situation I can’t abide, namely scenes of near-drowning in which water rapidly fills a small area where the protagonists are trapped. Other movies which need not apply to my DVD library are any that might have even one close-up, glistening, slow-motion treatment of the blood, sweat and saliva slinging from a man’s face after a boxer’s punch. Or, worst of all, movies where the dog dies.

Everyone draws the line somewhere. My mother refuses to watch anything with ghosts in it – bend your index finger and moan “Redrum! Red-rum!” and she just about loses it. One of my college friends had a phobia of mud, and it’s surprising how many movies this ruled out for her – she wasn’t bothered by the T-Rex in Jurassic Park: it was the mud he stepped in.  My dad can’t abide Julia Roberts – he claims it’s the vein that pops out of her forehead when she emotes.  And to my knowledge, there is only one film that my brother and I both refuse to watch under any circumstances.

Brad and I don’t have much in common. He ruled golf camp and I took art classes. He rode a unicycle while juggling in the high school talent show, and I was editor of the school paper. He played the keyboard and cornet, and I could barely squawk out a tune on my plastic recorder.  He excelled at chess, while Monopoly made me hostile.  But we both agree that E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is the most terrifying movie we’ve ever seen.

As I recall, Mom and Dad were united in the suggestion: let’s rent E.T. tonight and watch it as a family. I remember my trepidation – somehow I had seen pictures of the alien in question and there was something ineffably sinister about E.T. – but Dad took me on his knee and told me how nice it would be to watch it all together, and I agreed to try it.

We got the VHS at the local Blockbuster. It was the beginning of a lifelong saga of fear and few things united my brother and me more. The magic of the supposedly touching intergalactic friendship was lost on us. We remembered the gravelly, otherworldly voice. We remembered the scrawny-armed, ungainly, pot-bellied figure creeping through the yard, eating Reese’s Pieces with nightmarish long fingers, one of which glowed fiery red at its bulbous tip. And the part where E.T. becomes sick and turns milky white and he and the little boy are laid in a horrifying hospital tent with plastic tubes for hallways – don’t even get us started. Brad, at five years old, never actually made it to the end of the movie. At twenty-five, he still doesn’t want to know how it ends. “E.T. phone home,” we’d intone when we wanted to scare each other. Home was a place where there were no E.T. videocassettes.

Fortunately, it was relatively easy to keep E.T. out of our lives. The closest I came to E.T on a regular basis was a plush version which loomed over the children’s section of our public library, which annoyed me not just because it was scary, but because I could not divine what E.T. had to do with literature.

But little did I know the cinematic purgatory that awaited us on a two-year streak of Thanksgivings spent with our otherwise beloved aunt and uncle in North Carolina. Our relatives were wonderful hosts with a pool and a TV room, and one day I even discovered an abandoned stash of Beverly Cleary books. After dinner on our first Carolina Thanksgiving, I went upstairs to the pillowy, cave-like TV room to ring in the Christmas season with the annual primetime broadcast of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But apparently that wasn’t the only traditional airing – my aunt was waiting for her favorite movie to come on, the movie that always made her cry in the end; it was such a nice family movie, would we watch it with her?

When I realized that E.T. was about to come on, I battled with myself about the polite thing to do. The right thing would be to stay on the couch and watch E.T. along with my affectionate aunt. But by comparison, curling up with Henry and Beezus seemed like the Promised Land. I sidled out of the room, but cursed myself for my cowardice – was it really so scary? I made myself re-mount the stairs just as the young Drew Barrymore encountered E.T. hiding in a closet of stuffed animals. She screamed as the wide-eyed loaf of his head shot upwards on its accordion snake of a neck, and I fled the area.

Later that night, nestled in a sleeping bag on the floor and watching the open bedroom door, I imagined that E.T. crept on his knobby, ape-like feet down the shadowy hallway.

The next year Thanksgiving presented an obvious dilemma and I was preoccupied during dinner. If I went up to the TV room to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, would anyone remark upon my missing the annual horror show that followed? Could I depart unnoticed or would I be obligated to explain my childish fears? In the end, I decided to forgo Rudolph altogether so that my absence during E.T. could be attributed to a general disinterest in watching TV.

Perhaps the old public library had had a yard sale. Wherever he came from, E.T. was back, staring up at us from the auction table. Washed up on the auction’s island of misfit junk, there was a steadfast melancholy in those plastic eyes, and for the first time ever I thought about E.T’s side of the story: a weird but admittedly benign little creature alone in a strange world. Someone had hoarded – or maybe even loved – this plush E.T.: how had he ended up here along with the erasers and the Jesus-shaped fish parts?  If I recall correctly, his live-action counterpart was finally whisked away in a Spielberg-esque spaceship of his peers (the little boy, inexplicably, seemed sad rather than relieved to see E.T. go). But I doubted that the E.T. in my hands could command the minimum five-dollar bid. Perhaps someone would throw him in with the pin from New Jersey, but either way, there was no going back for him.

I lost interest in the bidding before I saw who took E.T. home that night. I found a chair on the sidelines, did a crossword puzzle, and wondered if my brother would watch E.T. with me if I asked him to. As we’ve survived and even enjoyed movies like The Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist and Paranormal Activity (rich ground for apartment-related nightmares) in the intervening years, it’s unlikely that E.T. would stir the terror that it once did, and we could put the whole thing to rest. My mother (who barred us from watching The Simpsons because it was “crass”) would certainly appreciate an end to the teasing about how she scarred our childhood with E.T. But something told me that there will be no further viewings of The Extra-Terrestrial.  Just like the childhood things we know our parents would never auction off, such a long-lived, luminous fear – particularly when it’s shared – may just be something we like to come home to.

 

 

 

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INCEPTION: Star Wars meets Star Wars (And a Whole Lotta Men)

August 19, 2010

“No, no, if it falls over, he’s in the real world. If it keeps spinning he’s dreaming.”

“So was he dreaming?”

“No, he wasn’t, it was real.”

“No, it wasn’t really real.”

I didn’t just hear it in the parking lot after Inception ended. It went on and on. For days, at my jobsite’s morning meeting, the first order of business was who had seen Inception last night and what they thought, who was definitely seeing it tonight, who was thinking of seeing it this weekend, and who saw it in IMAX. There was a wild rumor that one co-worker had plopped down into his seat and promptly drifted off, unconscionably missing the entire thing. Posts in my Facebook feed announced friends’ second and even third trip to view the movie – a phenomenon I had previously noticed only with Twilight-obsessed moms.

I have always thought too much about dreams. Like most people, my husband will occasionally wake up in the emotional grip of some particularly bizarre or troubling dream, but he claims that he seldom remembers his dreams. I envy him. The earliest dream I can remember was a nightmare I had at about five years old. I followed a line of my stuffed animals leading mysteriously to the doghouse, but when I peeked inside, a real lion roared in my face.

There are the multi-layered dreams, where I wake up again and again before I actually wake up
(perhaps Chris Nolan has been snooping around in my head). After layers of a particularly addling one as a child (giant centipede crawling through hole in the wall), I finally woke up for real and went to ask my mother if I was speaking to her in real life. She said of course I was. And then I woke up. Worst dream: buried alive in my own front yard. Best dream: biked the entire Caribbean and then swam with humpback whales. Most surprising dream: a Tyrannosaurus Rex was chasing me around a huge 19th-century mansion, but when it finally trapped me on the grand staircase, it gave me kiss instead of eating me. Nowadays, it’s the usual vivid bizarreness (demon in a bureau stole my car keys) interspersed with my recurring dream, which I call the “dropped the ball” dream. This takes place on some kind of sprawling college campus, where I suddenly realize that I’ve been enrolled in a class for several weeks without doing any of the reading, going to class or buying the textbook. I can’t even find the classroom. In a variant on this dream, I suddenly realize I agreed to feed someone’s pets, and then forgot all about them for a week.

Inception, while unfailingly interesting, wasn’t nearly as much of a nail-biter as my own dreams. I thought Ellen Page of snarky Juno fame really held her own with all those megawatt boys, and Marion Cotillard was as subtly sinister as she was fragile and alluring. Watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt stack the other actors, floating like the half-sunk pool toys my mother’s dog craves, in a zero-gravity hotel room may have been worth the price of admission on its own. And for its ethereal mental-world theme, Inception packs some bone-smacking violence and elemental collisions. And given that the vast majority of the film is successfully devoted to the execution of planting an idea rather than stealing it, the essential opening set-up of the idea of dream espionage is remarkably elegant, not adding undue length to the film.

But the ladies in front of me on the train last week may have hit the nail on the head better than anyone else. “Oh, I liked it,” they said. “Oh, yes. I didn’t really follow what was happening, I mean I couldn’t really figure out what the sequence of it all was, but he was very good in it. I really liked him.” Which one was “he”? Does it matter?

“Dear Joseph Gordon-Levitt,” a friend opines on Facebook. “You were so incredibly adorable in Inception…your fancy clothes were too much to deal with. GOOD LORD you are cute. SWOON.” Let’s stop going on about the filmmaker’s vision and the movie’s mind-blowing plot layers and acknowledge what this movie really is: a man smorgasbord which may be unprecedented in the entire history of film.

I have to admit, I am glad to see that Leo has maintained a presence in my life years after the tear-soaked sleepovers to watch Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet on VHS.  However, I’m a little worried about how lined DiCaprio’s face looks compared to the tanned and cherubic Jack Dawson onboard the Titanic, because this suggests that a worrying number of years have elapsed since my teens.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt has matured nicely into lanky, understated good looks (given sleek advantage in the dark suits which overwhelm my friend) from his overly-coiffed days on Third Rock from the Sun. Cillian Murphy has got strange eyes, but there is something arresting about his face. Ken Watanabe is the undisguised object of a shameful excess of Memoirs of a Geisha viewings in my apartment. And then there’s Tom Hardy, whom I first met as Heathcliffe on Masterpiece Theatre. Out of all of Inception’s delectable gentlemen, Hardy has the special distinction of having sojourned in one of my dreams, which rarely seem to have any basis in anything I’ve actually seen or done. It’s none of your business, but Tom Hardy and I were on a field trip, kissing in the back of the school bus. If my husband reads this blog, I will answer for this, but if he doesn’t, you won’t tell him, will you?

Of course, many people will laud Inception for more than its handsome movie stars. They may cry that Chris Nolan has given us something never seen in the world of cinema. To this, I would just like to say that the scene in which our heroes assault an inscrutable snowy bunker with all sorts of ropes and scruffy-yet-futuristic vehicles and grenades while battling faceless, easily vanquished soldiers, is exactly what would have happened if the climactic Forest Moon of Endor battle scenes from Return of the Jedi had been moved to the ice world of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. Guard your dreams, George Lucas. And why does Chris Nolan seem to think that planting an idea in someone else’s head is an extraordinary, innovative feat? I thought the only way to get a man to do anything was to make him believe he thought of it himself. Women have been doing this for centuries without the risky, fantastical mental labyrinth of shared dreams.

When I went to bed after watching Inception, I have to admit that I was curious what my dreams would be. Well, my husband and I were driving through some kind of wasteland decimated by a deadly virus (sort of The Stand meets 28 Days Later). A highlight included a pet store full of quarantined children who were turning not into zombies but into flesh-eating white rabbits (very Rabbit of Caerbannog, come to think of it). As if this weren’t bad enough, there were also Bigfoots taller than telephone poles on the loose. My husband had the perversity to get out of the car and for no earthly reason lie down in the middle of the empty road. I pleaded desperately with him, knowing that if a giant Bigfoot were to come along, he’d be smashed like a caveman in a Gary Larson panel.  He finally acquiesced and we drove to my parents’ house, which, we were glad to see, had a Bigfoot and white rabbit-proof underground bunker identical to the Restricted Housing Unit of a maximum security prison. I decided to lay out a celebratory buffet of vegetables in the dining room, and then was surprised to realize that I had two children in the backyard, where, to my horror, a Bigfoot had appeared. But he didn’t squash the children – they were all dancing the Hokey-Pokey (or was it the Macarena?) together. Now if all of this was not the product of my very own mind, I’d like to know who is responsible.

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