Aug 11
Hot on the heels of the extended interview feature comes a new, full-length trailer for Spike Jonze’s movie of Where the Wild Things Are. And, despite my longstanding scepticism about the notion of a movie of Sendak’s book, I have to say it looks amazing.
(And that wild, exultant music in the background? It might sound like Jonze’s old pals in The Polyphonic Spree, but it’s actually ‘Wake Up’, from Arcade Fire’s debut album, Funeral).
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If you haven’t seen it, this teaser for the new Ricky Gervais movie, Cemetery Junction, is rather good . . .
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Jun 21
I’m not quite sure when this site turned into the House of Pulp (note to self – finish long post about The Kindly Ones before literary credentials evaporate completely) but at the risk of alienating those few serious people still hanging in there, I invite you to feast your eyes on the glory that is the new trailer for Roland Emmerich’s 2012.
I’ve long thought Emmerich, who directed Godzilla, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and, most recently, the brain-numbingly dopey 10,000 BC is misunderstood. It’s easy to point to the cornball dialogue (“What happened to the right of people to FIGHT FOR THEIR LIVES!”) and the increasingly ridiculous plots of his films and miss the very real beauty of the images of mass destruction he creates. In many ways his movies seem closer to the work of a painter like Breugel, with their beautifully rendered landscapes and occasional, apocalyptic fervour, than to conventional movie-making. Certainly there’s something almost painterly about much of The Day After Tomorrow, which is filled with images of sudden, and breathtaking beauty (the birds flying away from New York, for instance).
The trailer for 2012 is all this and more. A riff on the broader conflation of the Mayan calendar and theories predicting the end of the world (there’s a nice Wikipedia article on the subject if you’re not familiar with them), it begins with the assumption that the end of the Mayan Long Count on 21 December 2012 really does predict the end of the world, and moves from there into the usual collage of characters fighting for their lives. Now I’ve obviously not seen the film, but it looks pretty gob-smacking to me (not least because the whole Long Count idea has always given me a little shiver of anxiety anyway) with one completely awesome image of destruction after another. And, in the midst of it all, there’s a magnificent little grab where one of the characters says he’s heard the government is building a huge boat, and a moment later a giraffe is seen being winched into it.
Like I said, pure genius . . .
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It’s also available in HD:
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Jun 2
So. I’m working on a piece about vampire lit for the July issue of The Australian Literary Review (the June issue of which is in tomorrow’s Australian, just btw) and as a result I’ve spent the last few weeks reading more crappy vampire novels than any sane person should have to. But having waded my way through the books I’m now having to get to work on the movies, which is why, last night, I found myself in front of Twilight.
Now even before I saw it I knew it was meant to be at least interesting, if only because it was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who directed Lords of Dogtown and Thirteen (and who, if memory serves, was rather unceremoniously dumped off the sequel after Twilight was deemed too “arty” by the studio) but I have to say I wasn’t expecting a lot, so the reality came as something of a pleasant surprise. In fact the film itself is a bit of a treat, at least until the grinding of the plot machinery takes over in the second half. Bella and Edward are a little dull, but everyone around them is wonderful, and Hardwicke lends the otherwise fairly routine material a slightly off-kilter sweetness that’s difficult to resist. Even small scenes, such as the one in which Bella’s father introduces her to Billy and Jacob are beautifully staged and composed. Of course it all goes wrong once the plot takes over, but until then there’s a lot to like.
Less obvious is the sheer gorgeousness of the film as a film, not just in terms of its cinematography and use of location, but in terms of editing and sound and, rather more obviously, music. Rather than the bombastic rock one might have expected, Hardwicke has assembled a soundtrack built around guitar music by Carter Burwell and a collection of tracks by Paramore and Linkin Park. But pride of place in the film goes to ‘Flightless Bird, American Mouth’, the stunning closing track from Iron & Wine’s 2007 album, The Shepherd’s Dog
I’m not sure The Shepherd’s Dog
And if you’re marvelling at the beard, apparently he doesn’t like to talk about it. (Annoyingly I read something just the other day about the cultural significance of the crazy beard thing, but I can’t remember where it was, so if anyone else saw it, and knows where it was, please let me know).
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Mar 11
On the weekend I linked to the wonderful credit sequence of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. Now io9.com are offering a blow by blow guide to the many visual gags and references contained in the credits. It makes delightful reading, though I also suspect the attention to detail the article unpacks, and its deliberate echoing of the visually encoded and layered complexities of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s original graphic novel is one of the qualities which makes the film itself such an oddly enervating experience.
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Mar 8
I’m planning to write something about Watchmen in the next couple of days, but one of the things I won’t be able to do is avoid echoing the view of critics as disparate as The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane and io9′s Meredith Woerner that in many ways the best thing about the film is its marvellous credit sequence. It’s certainly not the first time the heroes of the Golden Age have been lovingly invoked so their nostalgic glow can be undercut by a later, and darker reality — you only have to look to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
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Mar 8
Friday’s New Scientist has a tantalizing little item about the supposed discovery of the skeleton of a “vampire” in Venice. The body, which was discovered during the excavation of mass graves dating from the plague of 1576 on the island of Lazaretto Nuovo, was found buried with a brick forced into its open mouth, as the rather unsettling image to the right depicts.
Sadly I don’t have a decent cultural history of vampires to hand (though if you’re after one, Amazon
The reasons for this are complex, but I suspect they’re also oddly basic. The vampire myth, whether in its contemporary, Western form or its various variants and precursors draws together the two deepest elements of the human psyche, sex and death, and binds them together (indeed in a very real sense it is the distorted mirror image of that other great ritual of blood and death and the acceptance of another’s flesh into one’s own body, the Christian communion). It’s a potent brew, so potent, in fact, that in some very real sense the vampire is a kind of universal signifier, able to accommodate almost any anxiety about sex or death, from Dracula’s fin de siecle anxieties about sexuality and moral decline, to anxieties about homosexuality, and blood, and disease, to the images of a death-obsessed Old World which drive Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe. It can also, in the manner of these things, become so overdetermined as to signify not much at all, as the oddly engaging but essentially silly True Blood demonstrates.
All the same, it’s chastening to be reminded of the extent to which, even now, in a world transformed by technology, we are still creatures of our biology, driven by the primitive urges of fear and desire, and haunted by nightmares that, for all that their digital sophistication, are essentially the same as the fears that drove the plague-battered people of Venice to bury a woman with a brick rammed in her mouth four and a half centuries ago.
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I promise I’ll stop after this, but EW has an interview with the improbably named author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith, about his book and discovering his wasn’t the only Jane Austen mash-up on the market. (I’ve also rather belatedly realized he’s the same Seth Grahame-Smith who blogs on Huffington Post, which probably reveals some unexamined snobbery on my part, but we won’t got there).
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Feb 18
Now this is just getting silly. Sean Williams has very kindly pointed me to an article in io9 explaining that Pride and Predator is only one of three science fictional reworkings of Jane Austen which are in the pipeline. I have to say that while Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sounds good to me, Pride and Predator still pips it at the post.
Three Jane Austen Science Fiction Movies In The Pipeline?
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Update: I now discover that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is an adaptation of an existing novel (“The Classic Regency Romance—Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!” according to the publisher). I’m trying, but I’m just not sure I can keep my finger from the Amazon trigger . . .
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Feb 17
Image via Wikipedia
Now this I like. Variety reports that Elton John’s production company, Rocket Pictures, are working on an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in which proceedings are interrupted by the crash-landing of a hostile, flesh-eating alien. And if that doesn’t sound good enough all on its own there’s always the film’s title, Pride and Predator.
Apparently Sir Elton will compose the music (which I suppose has horrific possibilities all of its own).
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Feb 11
Lost returns to Australian television tonight, several weeks after it resumed in the US and in the rather unfriendly timeslot of 10:30pm.
Presumably the tardy return and crappy timeslot are a reflection of the show’s waning ratings, at least here in Australia. While the loss of viewers to downloads has forced Australian networks to release popular shows in a more timely manner than they have traditionally deigned to (SciFi on Foxtel are to be commended for their decision to screen the final season of Battlestar Galactica only hours after it goes to air in the US) old habits die hard, and as soon as a show begins to fail in the ratings it’s a fair bet the commercial networks will be treating viewers with the dizzying disrespect they always have by screening them long after primetime, delaying episodes and altering their schedules without warning (a disaster for anyone trying to record programs).
Jack (Matthew Fox) and Ben (Michael Emerson) find Locke's body
It’s a pity, in many ways, because as anyone who has stuck around through the longueurs of the second and third seasons knows, Lost went from strength to strength across its increasingly wild fourth season, and reviews from overseas suggest the fifth is even better. As Season Three ended, several of the survivors (Jack, Kate, Sayid, Hurley, Sun and Claire’s son, Aaron) are off the island, a turn of events a series of flash-forwards (mirroring the device of the flashbacks in the first few seasons) have revealed to have caused any number of problems of its own. Jack is a drunken wreck, his relationship with Kate has come unravelled, Hurley is in an asylum and talking to dead people, Sayid is an assassin employed by the perfidious Charles Widmore, Sun has taken over her father’s criminal and business empire and Locke, last seen trying to save the island, is in a coffin on the mainland. The fate of many of those back on the island, in particular Jin, is unclear, but the island itself seems to have teleported away not just through space but through time. And Ben has arrived to tell Jack and the other members of the Oceanic Six that if they want to save themselves and the other survivors they have to go back to the island.
It’s exactly as mad as it sounds, of course, and almost as incomprehensible. Like many shows which rely upon the unravelling of intricate plots, it’s almost impossible to keep track of precisely what’s going on, and indeed in many ways, keeping track of what’s going on is almost beside the point. What matters is the almost visceral thrill of the show’s twists and turns, and the sense that some new craziness lies just around the corner.
Last week I published a piece in The Australian Literary Review about the rise of what I called the new television. In it I argued that shows such as The Sopranos represent a mode of television drama unlike any we have seen before, filmic in their exploration of the medium’s visual and aural possibilities and novelistic in their preparedness to reject the generic conventions of series television and embrace the complexity and ambiguity of our inner lives.
One of the more striking aspects of this new television is the way it has been made possible by changes in television’s economic model, and by the rise of cable networks less reliant upon advertising and the growing popularity of alternative distribution models such as DVD and downloads, legal or otherwise. This shift away from reliance upon advertisers has allowed the cable networks to make more courageous choices about content and style, and to rely upon greater loyalty from their audiences over time, allowing longer and more complex storylines to be developed and explored.
Image via Wikipedia
Lost and The Sopranos are quite different phenomena of course. If The Sopranos can be understood as the early 21st century’s answer to Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy, Lost’s antecedents are to be found in the Saturday morning serials of the 1930s, and more particularly, the Silver Age comics of Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and others. Certainly Lost, like other, more obviously derivative shows such as Heroes, owes more than just its subject matter to the pulpy, four-colour world of the comic strip. Its structure, with the movement back and forwards in time from an essentially static present is reminiscent of the comic, as is its dependence upon the show’s complex and intertwined mythology. But in many ways it is its dependence upon the piecing together of the puzzles it presents, rather than the transformation of character through action and circumstance to generate narrative excitement and interest that ties it most closely to the comic. For all the intensity and vividness with which characters like Jack are drawn, it’s not their personal and existential travails we’re interested in, merely the part they play in a much larger picture, just as with Spiderman it’s the thrill of recognition we feel in discovering the Green Goblin is Harry Osborn’s father that keeps us reading.
J.J. Abrams
It’s a mode of storytelling Lost’s creator, J.J. Abrams has spent much of the last decade perfecting. First in Alias (a show I never warmed to), and more recently in the drearily derivative Fringe, as well as in films like Mission Impossible III, Cloverfield and the upcoming Star Trek reboot, Abrams has demonstrated an remarkable capacity to marry a purely pop, MTV aesthetic to narrative elements which rarely find their way into mainstream television. Sean Williams, for one sees Lost, with its teleportation and time travel plots, as a trojan horse designed to smuggle science fictional tropes into the mainstream, and in many ways the same could be said of all of Abrams’ work to date.
Part of the Abrams mystique is the illusion that everything in shows such as Lost and Fringe is part of some intricate plan worked out in advance. Like many other television shows, Lost assumes many of its viewers will watch (and indeed rewatch) episodes on Tivo and DVD, allowing them to pause and rewind, and as a result every second frame has some secret unlikely to reveal itself on a casual viewing hidden in it. If a television is on during a flashback in Lost you can assume whatever’s on will pertain to the plot, if a document is glimpsed on a table it will matter, if a logo appears on a coffee cup it will be part of the larger picture.
Obviously this increasingly complex web of associations in Lost and other shows like it depends upon exactly the same transformation in delivery technologies that underpins the rise of the new television more generally. Yet they are supplemented, in Lost’s case, by the very intelligent and deliberate use of the internet. Google Lost, and you will find endless discussions and spoilers, attempts to unravel the show’s mysteries and general speculation about what every detail might mean. And it’s not idle chatter either: I suspect for many viewers this second life (if you’ll pardon the pun) is as much a part of their enjoyment of the show as its more immediate pleasures.
Evangeline Lilly as Kate
The illusion it’s all planned is, of course, just that. One only has to look at the description of the original pilot (which was meant to star Michael Keaton as Jack, and have him die at the end of the first episode) to be reminded of the organic manner in which any television show, even one as intricate as Lost, evolves. Perhaps to his credit Abrams seems happy to give away the sort of fascistic control over every aspect of his shows’ creation that David Chase clearly exerted over The Sopranos or Matthew Weiner now exerts over Mad Men (there’s a fascinating if appalling depiction of Weiner at work in this excellent New York Times feature about life on the Mad Men set)
It’s also interesting to contrast Abrams’ manipulation of the illusion of control with the cheerful and slightly dismaying preparedness of Ronald D. Moore, co-creator of Battlestar Galactica, another show whose success depends at least in part on the complexity of its overarching narrative, to admit how many of the crucial decisions about Battlestar Galactica are made in the most casual fashion (“Who shall we make the last of the Final Five? Adama? The President? Ellen?????”).
Jack and Sayid (Naveen Andrews) on the island
Given this careful calibrated interplay between the collaborative technologies of the internet (an interplay shows like Battlestar Galactica also build on through the release of mini webisodes between seasons) it would be tempting to see Lost and shows like it as the first wave of a new, viewer-driven mode of television, a wikivision if you like, but they’re not, or not really. The shows are still driven from the top down, even if they aren’t mapped out by their creators in quite the detail they pretend they are. And it is worth asking whether viewer-driven television would be attractive anyway. In the days of yore, when Xena was one of the hottest shows on tv, its writers checked out the newsgroups, and discovered, somewhat to their dismay, that its fans were enraged by many aspects of the current season. Pleased to have an insight into what viewers did and didn’t like, they began to change storylines and finesse characters to meet the wishes of their fans. The strategy worked. Within a few episodes the chat on the newsgroups grew far more positive. But simultaneously, ratings began to slide. Pleasing the diehard fans, it turned out, was not the same as pleasing viewers more generally.
Yet there’s little doubt Lost and its relatives are part of a broader transformation of television drama, a transformation driven by related, forces to those which have allowed shows like The Sopranos and The Wire and Big Love to flourish. And, like those shows, they represent a flowering of televison drama which speaks to its vitality as a form. Whether this renaissance can survive the next wave of changes to the media landscape is an interesting question, but for now, I’m just happy to have Lost back.
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A Lost Mastermind offers a crash course
A Lost Recap: On Lost, the Island Skips, Skips, Skips in Time
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