directed by Tim Burton
screenplay by John August
after the book by Roald Dahl (1964)

115 min.

First some comments about the material.

Roald Dahl’s children’s books often feel improvised, which is part of their charm. A bit like Lewis Carroll, he makes up something whimsical and then watches it play out for a bit, then something else whimsical, etc.: episodic diversion. I remember that Matilda surprised me, when I first read it in 5th grade, for being so oddly paced. (I also remember that as being the first time I felt the warm satisfaction of confidently and seriously reading a book intended for younger children.) It doesn’t seem like Roald Dahl concerned himself, in these stories, with “pacing” per se. They find balance in other ways.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a particularly eccentric construction. Unlike Alice, who drifts away from reality on page 2 and by the next page is already down the rabbit hole, Charlie takes a very long time to get to the candy. Charlie’s home life and the golden ticket hunt, which clearly serve an expository function, take up a remarkably large chunk of the book. The factory tour itself, when it finally starts, seems to be both a candy-praising parade of nonsense and a one-by-one cautionary tale about parenting; not the most sensible combination, really. I’ve never quite bought the “lessons” in the book, since the moral order they imply is pretty well contradicted by the chaotic orgy of candy in which they are staged. Violet Beauregarde gets her comeuppance because she chews gum all the time – and she receives it in the form of wonderful, magical gum! The difference between Violet’s gum and Willy Wonka’s gum is just that we hate Violet; the only moral distinction drawn in the book is between kids who keep quiet and kids who annoy Roald Dahl. Augustus Gloop isn’t there to make a case against gluttony; he’s there because there’s a large audience for hating fat people and wanting to see them die.

Of course, he doesn’t really die, but that’s just Roald Dahl’s gift to the audience, so that we can, ahem, have our cake and eat it too. He slips it in at the end for those of us who felt a little guilty at enjoying death.

Readers enjoy Roald Dahl, I think, because he wholeheartedly indulges meanspiritedness in his fantasies, just like most people. Wanting to see annoying people die is right there alongside wanting to fly – good fun in the land of make-believe. And I’m all for it.

The movie itself:

The movie itself was good, but troubled because it was neither a faithful adaptation nor a coherent original vision. The first part, pre-Wonka, was the closest in spirit to the book. I thought the scenes of Charlie and his family were pretty near perfect in every way. Most of the time, when a movie tries to create a fairy-tale atmosphere, it misses the point by pushing that atmosphere in your face as a marvel to behold. It is a strength of Edward Scissorhands as well as this movie that they give the fantastic elements no more than their due camera time and emphasis. There were no Lord of the Rings shots (as far as I can remember) where the CGI camera swooped and glided through space, wallowing in the fantasy. Though the opening sequence, a long animated trip through the automated chocolate production line, was close, and in my opinion a mistake.

The big problem here is Willy Wonka. It’s tempting to say, “oh, Johnny Depp’s doing something crazy again!” but obviously he isn’t the only one accountable for what the movie itself seems to acknowledge is a conspicuously weird characterization. Tim Burton long ago established that he thinks it’s funny/interesting to juxtapose completely different aesthetic worlds and watch them undercut one another. Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas (not technically directed by Burton, I know) take this clash of aesthetic worlds as their subject matter, which is why they’re among his most emotionally successful films. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, too, is all about the wacky incompatibility of Pee-Wee with various genre scenarios.

So it felt suitably Tim Burton, to me, when a lot of mysterious atmosphere would be casually punctured by Johnny Depp’s screwy little Willy Wonka voice, a bit like Corky St. Clair’s attempts at stern manliness in Waiting for Guffman. The role of Willy Wonka is comparable to Bugs Bunny, or God: all-powerful wizard with an only-semi-explicable agenda. This movie filled that role with a character who kept betraying the atmosphere of his magic kingdom by being easily flappable, preoccupied, and, though ostensibly responsible for the magic, apparently also a bit bewildered by it.

I could justify this atmosphere-puncturing in several ways: 1) The movie, with giant sets and twinkling music, oversells fantasy that is much more matter-of-fact in the book; the flawed and confused Wonka brings it all down a notch. 2) The movie creates a character where none existed; the book’s Willy Wonka is little more than a personification and narrator of the surrounding whimsy, whereas the movie shows us just what sort of person would choose to cut himself off from the world and live in Candyland. 3) Willy is portrayed as damaged and fragile to fit in with the new storyline in which he is reconciled with his dentist father. This storyline allows the movie to have at least one character arc that resolves, something lacking from the original book but absolutely necessary. 4) The movie’s Wonka is just an additional funny note that doesn’t alter the basic workings of the story.

But I don’t think any of these is true. As I said earlier, the original book is eccentrically constructed and lives off its own peculiar sense of balance. Trying to “fix” that just leads to trouble: Johnny Depp’s Wonka-as-fragile-freak just doesn’t make any sense. This guy doesn’t know how to accomplish anything; the final scenes of the movie show that his whole scheme has been fairly half-assed and that he probably had nothing at all to do with the pseudo-moralist punishments of the various other children. In fact the movie gets several laughs out of meta-jokes, where Willy Wonka remarks on how frequently he seems to be having flashbacks, or seems uncertain how it is that his factory can have an entire wing devoted to fixing the puppets that broke earlier in the tour. It’s not his movie; he just works here. The screenwriter’s sense of whimsy gets in the way of Roald Dahl’s, and so too, I would say, do Tim Burton’s and Johnny Depp’s.

Gene Wilder’s extremely distinctive characterization in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) might not have been quite what’s in the book, but it solved the problem of keeping a flesh-and-blood character both ambiguous and all-powerful. That movie feels, like the book, like it might well be a tale told by Willy Wonka. Not this one.

But: the casting and design is all excellent, and for the most part this is really delightful. Lest that get lost in my complaining.

Last bit of complaining: the songs are a huge miscalculation. Dahl’s somewhat tedious rhymes are a clear reference to Struwwelpeter and all the dignified tradition of merciless poetry meant to scare kids straight. As I said, he twists it to his own ends: rather than “the sin of greed leads to hell,” his songs say “I hate horrible gum-chewing brats, they deserve to die,” which is a sort of joke, though I fear he may have taken himself quasi-seriously.

The 1971 movie understood this and provided some original, suitably nursery-rhyme-ish songs in the same tradition, to serve the same function (Dahl’s actual poems go on at great length and would be unendurable if sung). However, the new movie makes a garish point of not offering us nursery rhymes of morality. Instead, it presents selections from Dahl’s poems set in a variety of intentionally goofy pop-pastiche styles. The text-setting is awkward and very little can be understood. The numbers are staged as overblown dance numbers in keeping with the stylistic references (60s folk, techno-Latin, etc.) It seems like Danny Elfman thought “You know what would be cool? If I did this!” But 1) the audience is still aware of what actually belongs there, and this isn’t it, so this comes off as a pointless “hey, look at what we’re doing!” stunt, and 2) Danny Elfman chose to do something he doesn’t do very well.

I remember that upon leaving The Nightmare Before Christmas, my father remarked that Danny Elfman’s songs were “primitive,” and he meant it admiringly. Elfman has a knack for memorably blocky, bold musical choices. His orchestrations (by Steve Bartek) are always beautifully polished while the music itself is unapologetically disorderly. It makes for great incidental music, and in The Nightmare Before Christmas, it produced songs that, though far from elegant, seemed quite suitable for stop-motion skeletons to sing. But the man has no rigor, and text-setting requires rigor. These songs were kludgy and embarrassing, moreso because they made such a point of being wrong for the story to begin with.

Cover of the first edition:

directed by Christopher Nolan
screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
story by David S. Goyer
based on characters created by Bob Kane

141 min.

Ugh. I try to be careful about which “big” movies I spend money and time on, but this one had been so well reviewed! And yet.

I don’t feel like faking a coordinated line of argument here. In summary: the movie’s flaw was that it was made out of junk. So I’m just going to mention some of the junk.

Thought is for those who think. This phrase occurred to me while being annoyed by tons of irritating “dark” pseudo-thought. A typical “serious” superhero-comic trick is to employ concepts like “honor” and “justice” and “the self” as though they are sacred, overwhelming, and difficult – and thus worthy of totally cool visuals! – but not to have any consistent attitude toward these things, and in fact to freely change their definitions from scene to scene so as to allow a continuous stream of these effects.

To give away the first part of the movie, as a demonstration of its total lack of interest in having a point: Bruce Wayne learns a bunch of ninja-type wisdom from a bunch of ninja-types who encourage him to use fear as power, by first conquering his own fears. Then the ninja-types turn out to be crazies who want to destroy Gotham City in the name of cleansing human culture. The turning point is when the ninja-types ask Bruce to show his dedication by killing an imprisoned murderer. Bruce says no, that he will fight for justice but will not be an executioner. Then, because he has realized that these ninja-types are bad guys, he BURNS DOWN THE BUILDING KILLING EVERYONE (presumably including the murderer). Then he goes on to become Batman, following the philosophy of the crazy bad ninja-types. They later show up with a plan based on using fear as power which Batman must stop because it is evil.

Making a confusion stew out of “philosophy” is easy. Then just hang black billowing drapes all over it and give everyone stony expressions. Brilliant!

The fight scenes looked like murky confusing crap to me. This seems to be a trend in movies today. Maybe it just reflects that I am getting out of touch with the acceptable speed of editing, but I think in this case it was due to crap.

Number of times that someone cleverly repeats someone else’s line from earlier in the movie back at them in a different context: I think eight.

I’m getting tired of this “making of a legend” stuff, like “ooh, so that’s how he found the bat cave! ooh, so that’s how he found the batmobile!” That’s all well and good for something jokey like Young Sherlock Holmes, which lives well outside the actual reputation-making canon of Sherlock Holmes himself, but I feel like a Batman movie would do better to spend its time demonstrating why Batman is a character worthy of legend and not just some comic book schlock. That’s snotty of me – it was, after all, called Batman Begins, and his reputation is pretty darn well-established. But fleshing out a sketchy character shouldn’t mean fleshing out the history of his costume. It was cute in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, because it was put where it belongs, as a throwaway at the very beginning. It was a cute in Spider-Man, but mostly because it had a punchline. I don’t need to see that stuff anymore. “Origin story” shouldn’t have to mean the nerdy game of finding justifications for the absurd details.

I HATE mindless movie “jokes” wherein someone comments earthily on how remarkable the premises of the movie are. E.g. the Batmobile appears and CGI drives over a bunch of police cars, and then the guy watching says “I have got to get me one of those!” Oy. This movie had that joke relentlessly.

Also, in general, if you have a movie that’s all about a kid who rides on a flying artichoke, it is lazy and irritating to include a bewildered policeman talking into his radio saying “Well, it looks a kid…but he’s RIDING ON A FLYING ARTICHOKE!” This movie had the bewildered policemen in it, frequently.

Both of these quasi-jokes try to get mileage out of the audience feeling like, “yeah, we’re all on Batman’s team but you’re not, silly rabbit, so we feel pretty darn good about ourselves when you envy him, or are astounded by him.” Total bottom of the barrel tactics, appealing to our desire to feel superior to outsiders. Yes, that’s really how I see it.

The second part of the movie revolves around a plot to activate a powerful microwave emitter that vaporizes all water in the vicinity. It turns out only to affect water in pipes; people are unharmed by it. I’m not one to complain about scientific errors in stupid movies, but even as comic book pseudo-science, this is no good, because the idea that a microwave oven can be deadly is something people ENJOY knowing. Urban legends about exploding cats and everyday paranoia about standing too close to the microwave oven are commonplace. You should build your pseudo-science in keeping with stuff like that, not against it!

Michael Caine just sells his “well, sir, I’m Michael Caine” act to any movie that has use for it, doesn’t he. Ditto Morgan Freeman. When their two characters had a brief exchange, it felt for a moment like we might have entered some movie-neutral zone from which we could enter ANY OTHER MOVIE. Katie Holmes smirks whenever she needs to look thoughtful and I’ll bet she does that in real life too; it’s not a bad trick for reality, though it’s weak for movies. Christian Bale has the right quality for this role, which is to say he barely registers as a personality, only as a set of traits. Tom Wilkinson is very reliable at making something out of his time onscreen and I always enjoy watching him. Gary Oldman might as well have been a non-name actor. The Scarecrow guy was doing some cheesy stuff throughout, but given the nature of his role it was actually pretty well handled. Liam Neeson delivered his lines very much as he did in The Phantom Menace, so I was imagining that he didn’t think much of the movie, but maybe I was just projecting. I’m not sure he’s as good and serious an actor as you might be led to believe by his demeanor.

Many scenes called to mind the movie that Adaptation becomes in its last act – a reasonably well-made version of a soulless, hacky script, an assemblage of complete phoniness. This was a Donald movie.

The music, oddly, was a collaboration between Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard and managed to be utterly trashy in the extreme. Hans Zimmer’s beloved pounding drums set the tone for pretty much every scene. I think James Newton Howard sometimes has a nice touch but it wasn’t in evidence here at all.

directed by Ben Sharpsteen
written by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer
after the book Dumbo, the Flying Elephant by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl (1939)

64 min.

Movies like Dumbo are the reason that attributing a movie to the “director” and “writer” as above is silly. It implies that the director is the person most generally responsible for the creative quality of the finished product, but of course that’s not really how a movie like this is made. The credits for Dumbo also include “Directing Animators,” “Supervising Animators,” “Story Development,” and “Story Direction.” Many movies, but animated movies in particular and Dumbo moreso than other animated movies, are the products of large collaborations, where leadership only exists as an organizational necessity, not a creative reality.

That’s actually part of what I took away from this viewing. I had forgotten how short, how casual, and how varied Dumbo was. I don’t think any other animated feature is quite so blatantly composed of sequences that really look nothing like one another. Set pieces like the tent-raising, the circus parade, Casey Junior, and the pink elephants all look and feel like completely different films from one another, and all of them also like completely different films from the style of the “story” scenes. I had forgotten how flat and cheap those scenes look compared to the other early Disney films. Apparently Dumbo was intentionally made as quickly and easily as possible, and it shows, if you’re looking for it.

But that’s not a bad thing. Unlike Fantasia and Snow White, which aspire to fineness with a weirdly tangible fervency of purpose that I guess was Walt’s own, Dumbo feels like a feature-length effort – well, almost feature-length – by the same team of goofy guys who made all those Mickey Mouse shorts. It felt to me like a lower, jazzier art form than the shining thing Disney himself apparently envisioned, a form that was the direct descendent of “Steamboat Willie” and “Lonesome Ghosts” etc., without the intervention of “beauty” or “quality” in quotes. While Snow White has a whiff of the European and the literary about it, Dumbo is completely American and even retains a little of that bad-for-your-teeth quality that is so characteristic of early cartoons. People talk about how moving the “Baby Mine” sequence is, but they forget that when the camera takes time off from Jumbo and Jumbo Junior, it goes to cute “gag” shots of hyenas, hippos, etc. I thought of Gilbert Seldes’ “The Seven Lively Arts”: the lack of pretension makes it invigorating. The emotions are more poignant because they’re part of such an unassuming package. The movie wanders around with no interest in the laws of pacing, the animators do what they like until the story seems done, and then it’s done, 64 minutes later. I thought it was great.

The music is excellent; really, really good. That’s part of what makes the haphazard thing hang together – the music is doing something charming (and charmingly orchestrated) pretty much nonstop for all 64 minutes. Those male-chorus musical numbers made a huge impression on me as a child and that “Look Out For Mr. Stork” sound is still pretty much inseparable from the world of children’s books. I haven’t seen this movie in many years, but I’ve continued to hear the “Pink Elephants” instrumental running in my mind all that time. I should get this soundtrack album.

Now, I had thought for years that Dumbo was the first Disney feature based on an original story, but today I learn that I was wrong – Dumbo is based on the book Dumbo, the Flying Elephant, by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl, published in 1939 by Roll-a-Book. Roll-a-Book was a novelty: the book was printed on a scroll in a box with a viewing window; you turned a wheel to progress the story. Naturally, when I heard about this, I thought, “I need a picture of that to put under the review!” But get this: NO COPIES ARE KNOWN TO HAVE SURVIVED. That’s right, the first edition of Dumbo is a completely lost item. If you’re like me, that makes you fantasize about finding it at a yard sale. Good luck, everyone!

Roll-a-Book appears in WorldCat only as 2 copies of a single title, Roll-a-Book for boys and girls No. 1 – The Lost Stone of Agog: A Fast Moving Adventure Story, featuring the Dare twins, by Gertrude Buckland Smith, with “roll-a-color illustrations” by Eleanor Schaefer. 22 cm. 1938. Mentioned nowhere else online. I’d love to see a picture of that, too.

However, a non-rolling edition of the original Dumbo was reprinted in 1941 prior to the release of the movie, apparently in a small run. A thorough summary with a good amount of the text is available here. Anyone got an image? I’d be much obliged.

directed by Steven Spielberg
screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb
after the novel by Peter Benchley (1974)

Yeah, Jaws.

The movies that I’ve already seen a zillion times are sometimes the most interesting to watch. How is it that there are lines in this movie, important lines that explain what’s going on, that I have never really heard and comprehended before today? It’s like I get to examine the way my mind used to work: my old viewing of the movie is the ground against which the figures of these “new” details stand out. I still clearly remember the strange experience of seeing the original Star Wars movies as a teenager, after watching them frequently as a child and then not at all during the crucial adolescent years. Words like “rebellion” and “empire” that had seemed like close companions of “wookie” now had strange, mundane meanings, and lo and behold, the dialogue explained what was going on. To my 7-year-old mind, the plot of The Empire Strikes Back was:

beginning part
part with the snow monster and then with the vision
talking part
part with the giant walking machines in the snow
part with asteroids and eventually with that big worm
part with the swamp and yoda
eventually, the scary cave part
some more talking parts somewhere in there
the part where you can see darth vader’s head sort of
part with the floating city
a bunch of little scenes
part where han solo gets frozen
part where they fight
part when he falls down a big tube
ending stuff

I don’t think that’s particularly cutesified, either; it’s a pretty accurate representation of the way I thought about what was quite possibly my favorite movie at that time. Upon seeing it later and noticing all the connective tissue, the ligaments and tendons and “logic” that had previously been incomprehensible and, furthermore, unnecessary, I felt like I was face to face with my former mind in a strange, bittersweet way. I think the movie sketched above is a little better than the The Empire Strikes Back that I would see if I watched it today. The title, however – this is all a bit Proustian, isn’t it – the title, however, has managed to maintain the particular flavor of the movie as I saw it then. Even today it takes a particular effort of will for me to hear it as a sentence in which the subject is “empire,” a large multi-territorial political entity, and the action is “strikes back,” deals a retaliatory blow. It’s the cadence that preserves the phrase, unburdened of these “generic” significations; as learned from my six-year-old peers, that cadence was and still is “the EM-pi-re STRIKES-back.” I just searched to find out the proper way of indicating that (anapest? dactyl?) but gave up.

Anyway, Jaws offered me a bit of that today. A girlfriend once told me that she didn’t want to watch Jaws because it was a “men at sea” movie, and that I just liked “men at sea.” At the time I thought she was missing the point, that Jaws was just a rollicking Steven Spielberg movie that happened to be in the “men at sea” milieu but which didn’t try to get mileage out of any kind of interest inherent to “men at sea.” Watching it tonight I thought, “Wow, this movie is mostly these guys shuffling around this boat, looking at barrels.” I used to think of it as a monster/adventure movie with cute cardboard characters, but in fact it is a character movie, because the monster has even less of a personality than the truck in Duel, rarely appears, and isn’t even portrayed as “overwhelming” until near to the end. It’s just a shark that’s threatening the beaches, so they’ve got to go kill it. If we the audience have the sense that something ominous is in store, it’s only because we know what kind of movie we’re watching. For the characters, sure it’s a big deal, but not a movie-worthy big deal, not until the very end.

In fact, I was struck by how much the movie seemed like a crowd-pleasing, encouraging portrait of American manhood. These three guys are purportedly a salty man-of-the-sea, a rich young shark expert, and an anxious landlubber, but what they end up doing is coping with a problem that none of them actually knows how to handle. They gamely take it on because, well, the men have to do it, so let’s figure out how to do it. They reminded me of my father figuring out how to fix the whatever, or of any number of other spatula-bearing barbecue-MCs of my youth, men who didn’t necessarily know how to kill this shark, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out. Because look, we know how to use the grill! That’s a good proud manly feeling, just like knowing how to fish. I think the paper-cup-crushing bit sums this all up fairly explicitly.

The movie has only reassuring comfort for the Chief Brodys of the world. It says: men with more experience than you might sing bawdy songs and get drunk and compare their scars – but the songs aren’t that bawdy, and they don’t get that drunk, and nobody really gets angry at anyone. And you might not know how to do anything useful like tie a knot or steer the ship, but in the end, it’s going to be about everyone working in good-natured equal ignorance. The gruff sea captain will just chuckle most of the time, and the nerdy scientist won’t really have any valuable knowledge.

I’m not sure what I’m saying here, but the overlay of suburban barbecue dads was vivid for me.

Of course, I’m talking about the second half of the movie. The first half is more genre-characteristic and, by being so solid, earns our sympathy for the long boat trip that would otherwise probably seem pretty monotonous and repetitive. It still does, sometimes.

But Steven Spielberg knows what he’s doing, is my other thought upon watching this movie.

Here’s the pre-movie cover:

directed by Walter Salles
screenplay by Rafael Yglesias
after the film Honogurai mizu no soko kara (Hideo Nakata, 2002)
screenplay by Hideo Nakata and Takashige Ichise
after a story from the book by Kôji Suzuki (1996)

It had the potential to be good, but it made so many tiny bad decisions, which cumulatively sabotaged the movie. I’ve seen the original movie, and I’m not saying it was a masterpiece, but it worked, and this remake could easily have followed the plan and worked equally well. It followed the plan in almost every respect, but then it changed little crucial things. And they were almost all mistakes.

Both versions are a really basic, bare-bones sort of ghost story, and in stories like this, it’s the details, the specifics of the build-up that matter. The first bit of ghostiness in the original is here made subtle to the point of being almost a non-event, just a moment of slight cinematic pressure, but no “evidence.” As soon as I saw that, I knew something was going wrong. The remake keeps this sort of thing up for most of the movie, smoothing over most of the surprises and clues and playing the “maybe it’s just psychological” card as steadily as it can.

I think their intention was to hold off the scary stuff in order to create more interest in the characters, and it actually may have worked on me, to some degree. Or maybe it was just Jennifer Connelly’s conscientious performance. In any case, I bought that this woman was a damaged young mother trying hard to stay on top of things, whereas in the original, the relationship between the woman’s childhood traumas and her current struggles was certainly indicated but I didn’t really feel it.

A lot of horror stories have that sort of after-the-fact easy psychology thrown on them, in the Stephen King manner – like, “the person who gets tormented by the spider aliens IS ALSO TORMENTED BY SELF-DOUBT, which adds depth to my schlock!” but what I can say for the original is that I believed that in this case, the filmmakers sincerely thought the relationship of the issue (neglected daughters) to the ghost (a neglected daughter) was important.

Odd, then, that the remake-makers somehow felt that the balance of the movie needed to be tilted even further in favor of non-ghost stuff. This source material had already found a good balance, I thought. By skewing the movie away from anything supernatural, the remake manages to make the ending seem like an embarrassing misstep, whereas if they hadn’t been so embarrassed to be making a horror movie in the first place, they could have prepared it properly, which ought to have been the whole point. Of course, they also screwed themselves by changing the ending.

The story ends with the ghost having its way, which is an unsettling place to end. The original believed in this ending and built the movie around it – it actually tied in to the “cycle of neglect” theme, in its way. The remake seems to feel obliged to stay true to the plot point but in every way possible waters it down – I know – so that it is as little unsettling as possible, and thus arbitrary and stupid. An epilogue that in the original drives home the compromised, creepy nature of the resolution is here reworked to be mere having-it-both-ways comfort, irritating and unnecessary. More important to a scaredy-cat like me, the one image of supernatural ickiness in the original has been wiped clean. To me, this has a huge impact on an entire movie – a movie that threatens to show you something icky and then finally makes good on the threat somehow actualizes all the earlier suspense, whereas a movie that holds that threat over your head and never lets it fall, not even a little, is just a scam. I’m not into gore in the least, but just one image that can correspond to the true heart of the threat in a movie has a certain talismanic power, at least for me, and this movie managed to put something totally benign in that position and show it to you several times over, thus killing the sense of portent that is so crucial to a slow-burn ghost story. This was a no-burn ghost story; nothing was even properly held over our heads as a threat for more than a scene – the remnants of that sort of suspense were here by pure inheritance from the original, but neither the screenwriter nor the director knew what function they were meant to serve.

Basically, this is a ghost movie made by people who apparently don’t like ghost movies, so they mumbled it, like someone embarrassed to say a word they don’t know how to pronounce. Such a shame, since the mumbling had good production design and a nice cast.

Though I do want to point out that John C. Reilly’s schtick was the same stuff he was doing in Magnolia, but was here really wrong and unamusing. A lot of reviews seem to have found him a fun presence, but he just seemed to me like someone half-assing it through a skit, getting cheap laughs out of not actually seeming like a real building manager. Tim Roth, on the other hand, did a very nice job with a pointless part.

When I saw that the music was going to be by Angelo Badalamenti, I thought that seemed like an excellent choice based on some of the creepy stuff he’s done for David Lynch, but the score turned out to be very mainstream and unimaginative, which I have to assume was the director’s choice. I think that even with this awkwardly adapted script, something more could have been salvaged, here, if the music had been committed to the idea that something moody and even a little dreamy was happening here, something uncanny that couldn’t be stopped. No such luck.

The 2002 Japanese movie upon which this was based, Honogurai mizu no soko kara, was translated/subtitled as Dark Water. The literal translation is apparently more like From the Depths of Murky Waters. This comes from the title of a 1996 collection of short stories by Kôji Suzuki. However, the movie is actually an adaptation only of the first story in that book, titled “Fuyuu Suru Mizu,” which in 2004 was translated into English, apparently accurately, as “Floating Water.” Not sure what “Floating Water” even means, but there you have it. This all took a bit of hunting so I thought I’d do you all the favor.

directed by Michael Anderson
screenplay by David Zelag Goodman
after the novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (1967)
120 min.

As far as the viewing experience goes, it’s terrible. I mean, I might have some non-negative stuff to say about it, but I don’t want to mislead anyone: it totally failed to be a good movie.

I’ll grant that a big part of that was the special effects, most of which have aged incredibly poorly. It was almost funny to watch the promotional “featurette” made at the same time and see the studio pushing the movie mostly in terms of the craftsmanship and high technology that went into the effects work. The miniature exteriors in the movie look so blatantly like miniatures that I often didn’t know what I was looking at, at first. “Which character has this big toy?” I would think. “Oh I see.” The sets all had that big blank clumsy quality that when I was a kid used to make me feel like not only was the place in the movie creepy, but the 70s were also creepy, since nothing about the movie seemed to acknowledge its all-pervasive creepiness. In THX-1138, a very similar movie, George Lucas sort of used that big blank feeling to his benefit, whereas here I got the impression that they really thought they had built the future. The ice cavern was particularly confusing/embarrassing. Star Wars, released a year later, apparently made it unacceptable for big studio movies to settle for effects like these. But I thought 2001, way back in 1968, famously established a new standard for effects, and most of 2001 still looks pretty good. So I’m not really sure why this stuff wasn’t already embarrassing in 1976, but apparently it wasn’t.

The writing was in the standard trashy sci-fi style, where nobody really has anything to say to each other except for to talk about the plot. And the acting lived right up to it, except for Peter Ustinov, who did his own thing with complete confidence. His performance was pretty ridiculous too but at least it was something to watch. Farrah Fawcett(-Majors) seemed to be handled with the sole interest of creating something that would become “camp” as quickly as possible.

The premise (live a life of pleasure and be KILLED ON YOUR THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY) is a messy one to elaborate on because it doesn’t make any sense. When you first hear it, you might think, “oh, interesting,” but that’s as much as you’re going to get – it’s a dead end. As I remember it, “The Lottery” leads up to the comparable nasty twist and then ends there, because the impact of that nastiness is the whole point. The movie of Soylent Green goes for the same thing, which rightly makes it the subject of a lot of mockery, because building a full-length movie around a nasty secret that’s only revealed at the end makes for a boring, obvious movie. A.I. was a movie based on a story with a twist, presented with the twist untwisted, and it had to wander very far afield in search of some other reason to exist. The sci-fi/horror short story that’s all about the final twist is a well-established form, but it just doesn’t translate well into a long form like a feature film. It happens all the time in my nightmares that I’ll have that horrible realization feeling, like, “my god, all along he’s been EATING them!” but when I wake up I see that the feeling exists on its own, not as part of a thought. Short stories can have that effect as their goal. Building something larger out of a “my god!” concept means setting up all kinds of provisional pseudo-logic to get you through.

Q: Why does this society accept death at 30? A: Um, because they’ve been led to believe that the death ritual reincarnates them.
Q: But who established this lie? A: Um, apparently this big computer.
Q: But I thought you said this culture was devised as a way of coping with a war-torn world. A: Um…yeah, that too.
Q: But when they go outside the world is fine. A: Um, right…right, it’s all unnecessary.

And so on and so on.

The fake-logic overload actually sets in in the first clause of the opening text: “The survivors of war, overpopulation and pollution are living in a great domed city…” The survivors of war, sure; the survivors of pollution, okay (though the water’s apparently fine); but “the survivors of overpopulation”?

Of course, Logan’s Run is adapted from a full-length non-twist novel, but I have no reason to believe the novel is any good! From what I read online, it seems to be a dorky rebuttal to 60s youth culture – “hey you guys, you think you’re so great being young and having a lot of sex, but you don’t want to have sex with me because I’m old and I write science fiction! You’d probably kill me off, if you had your way! But I can see finer things, human things, great things! The truth, outside your tawdry city of pleasure! You damn dirty apes!” Yeah – as I see it, Logan’s Run is a rejection of hedonism on the least philosophically defensible grounds – namely, sour grapes – and so, since it has no real case to make, it has to add this totally absurd death-cult aspect to make youth and pleasure actually seem unsavory. The movie ends with hordes of young people fascinated by a mumbly old wrinkly man, just as they might be fascinated by a puppy. There’s no chance in hell any of them wants to get old and BE him. Logan and his love interest make plans to get married, but they do it because it seems like a cute idea. They never actually rejected it – they’ve never considered it before – so they’re not learning anything new. Do you really think they’re going to stick with it?

There is a truth, buried under all this confusion, which is that young people in search of pleasure are somewhat oblivious to the truth of aging and death. But so are plenty of old people, and isn’t that, in fact, praiseworthy? Hedonism might be irresponsible, but not because it denies the inevitable! The inevitable can take care of itself. Hedonism is irresponsible because it denies things that actually could be improved, like, ahem, war, pollution, and overpopulation. Another standard sci-fi premise is the world in which pleasure is provided so long as you do not question it (a la THX-1138). But again, that’s a dorky abstraction that misses the point; the real-world culure of denial that these movies critique is not the result of a decree, it’s something most people WANT. If American culture provides us with a comfort-dome outside of which we’re not encouraged to look, it’s because supply and demand took us here. And yeah, that’s a problem, but it’s not one of those nightmare-style “big lie” problems that sci-fi likes. The “big lie” in a comfort-oriented culture is cumulative, not systematic. The Matrix is about a big lie perpetrated by, essentially, evil gnostic-style gods. Logan’s Run had an inscrutable evil in the form of a big computer. This isn’t a useful way of thinking about our problems. Brazil was a much more interesting movie in this respect, because it showed that the terrorists looking for an evil computer to blow up just added to the confusion.

I guess the political idea I’m moving toward here is that the “my god! it’s people!” vision is worse than naive, because it encourages the search for THE MISTAKE. And Logan’s Run was a good example of why that’s misguided, because the writers had to go to such terrible lengths to construct their world’s problems in the form of A MISTAKE.

I generally write and talk about movies in the present tense, but in writing this I notice that I drifted pretty heavily towards the past. I think that reflects something about the movie – it has nothing to say to the present; there’s only camp left here. And/or I guess nostalgia, for people of a certain age and inclination.

Looks like I didn’t have much non-negative to say after all.

4:38 PM: Oh yeah, I forgot – Jerry Goldsmith’s score was very cool and outclassed the movie many times over.

Here are some pre-movie book covers I found online.

directed and written by Miranda July
90 min.

Well, I enjoyed it. Rather than being a plotted, event-oriented movie, this is essentially a collection of semi-interrelated vignettes that, toward the end, have some semi-interrelated payoffs. I enjoyed that aspect; in fact I found it inspiring: I feel like I could make a list of cute ideas, but I’m not as sure that I could construct a satisfying story arc, etc. The message I took away from this movie was “if the ideas are actually cute and you do a good job, that can be enough. At least it is in this case.”

My friends winced a bit whenever the sentimental-see-how-quirky manner would rise above a certain threshold, but I (to my own surprise) was never annoyed. While I agree that not all of the sentiment worked (the principal flaw in the movie was that the relationship between the two romantic leads wasn’t earned, so everything that followed between them inevitably seemed contrived), I never felt that I was being handled cynically, nor did I feel that the director had ever gotten too sidetracked by the self-involvement that usually goes hand-in-hand with quirkiness (and performance art, and starring in your own movie!). Miranda July was present at the screening, and afterward A’d a couple inane Qs from the audience. When someone asked her, ahem, why the dialogue had been so “random,” she said that it was how she tends to speak and that she had, perhaps through lack of discipline, made everyone talk like her. This seemed a sincere answer. When someone asked why she had made the movie, she said that “it’s fun to be in the world,” and making a movie is a great way of communicating about that on large scale. That also seemed sincere, and captured pretty accurately what the voice of the movie is. It was like listening to a friendly person talking about how magical and amusing they think life and human interaction can be, and even if you think this person chooses a somewhat flaky way of getting at her points, you can’t deny that she means what she’s saying and wants you to feel it too. Sincerity and feeling are very sympathetic, to me, so I was sold.

On the other hand, that’s probably because this was my first encounter with this person, Miranda July. If she came at me with another movie and it had more Shoe Goo and tinkly music in it, I might think, “well, okay, but let’s not forget about the ways in which this isn’t applicable to reality.” For now, I give her the benefit of the doubt that she hasn’t forgotten. The movie seemed to know exactly what it was. In the Q & A she also said something about how the movie was “a kind of unreal, which is sometimes the best way of getting at the real.” There’s a truth there and also a danger, but I felt like this movie stayed on the side of the truth.

And I laughed harder than I’ve laughed at a movie in a long time. On a related note let me observe that casting is everything and the movie is well-cast.