Return of the robotical son: Astro Boy

Based on Tezuka Osamu’s beloved manga and anime franchise, Astro Boy is set partly in the clean and luxurious floating Metro City, and partly in the vast trash heap that constitutes the planet below, a dystopian vision in which the segregation of the wealthy elite from the underprivileged majority has been pushed to extremes—as have issues of waste disposal. Dr. Tenma (voiced by Nicolas Cage) experiments with “pure positive” and “pure negative” energies, which gets war-giddy President Stone (Donald Sutherland) jazzed on inventing excuses for some ultra-high tech ass-kicking to help boost his chances at re-election.

During one such experiment, single parent Tenma’s precocious only-son Toby (Freddie Highmore) is killed. Tenma plummets into grief and determines to bring Toby back to life by fusing some of the kid’s DNA into the body of a powerful robot look-alike, complete with all of Toby’s memories. But Tenma quickly becomes horrified by his creation, this cheerful little golem with his dead son’s smile and voice and demands for love. The robot Toby, our Astro Boy, is finally stranded on Earth, where other robots are onto his artificial nature while humans assume he’s one of them. He hooks up with a band of orphans led by one Ham Egg (Nathan Lane), a futuristic Fagan who hosts monster robot rallies. So Astro Boy has to keep a low profile, pose as a normal boy, conceal from the world his jet-propelled feet, superhuman strength, and machine guns ready to pop out of his synthetic flesh. Something that proves difficult once he knows that President Stone is on his tail and calling for his super-charged heart.

I’m not sufficiently versed in existing Astro lore to be certain how much of Flushed Away director David Bowers’ feature version extrapolates, bastardizes or re-invigorates the source material, but there’s no denying how engaged I was in Astro Boy’s recasting of Pinocchio, not to mention Oliver Twist, the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, and Freaks, its merging of familiar myths with modern concerns of class, isolationism, technological ownership, the environment, and the residual effects of rampant consumerism. Of course the implications are all pretty explicit, which seems perfectly legitimate given that this movie, with its moral parables, its colorful, fluid imagery and its exciting, explosive set pieces, is clearly geared toward a family audience.

Despite some notable histrionics from Cage, the vocal performances go a long way toward making Astro Boy feel buoyant amidst several detours into tragedy and eerie questions about what it means to be human. Sutherland actually underplays President Stone’s obvious roots in Bush Jr., Kristen Bell gives surprising texture to Cora, Astro Boy’s teenage love interest—speaking of eerie questions—and Samuel L. Jackson has a lot of fun within the very limited range of vocal possibilities of Zog, the giant robot pal revived by Astro Boy. Fantastic and somewhat simplistic as Astro Boy is, there’s a pleasing degree of investment here in what the consequences of our continued exploration of virtual culture and the uses and abuses of artificial intelligence. Sure beats the hell out of Surrogates, in any case.

Sleep, shadows, secret lives: Murakami, Hoffmann, Stevenson

Sleeping Beauty Edward Burne-Jones 1870

The days close early, and soon they’ll change the time on us and darkness will fall before we even leave work. October brings with it a surplus of night, but not, for some of us, any extra sleep. Me, I wake up in the wee hours, and most often pass the time reading. Come autumn I get hooked on spooky stories, and I got to thinking on stories about sleep itself. A favourite from Haruki Murakami—you can find it in The Elephant Vanishes—is actually called ‘Sleep.’ A seemingly normal middleclass woman stops sleeping. She reads Anna Karinina. The problem is that she never catches up—I’m told by experts that no one ever actually “catches up” on sleep, but it’s a handy expression—and she kinda likes it, the freedom, the hours no longer spent idly—think of all the gigantic Russian novels to read. She feels energized, renewed, as though undergoing some transformation. But into what?

E.T.A. Hoffmann

I don’t know if E.T.A. Hoffmann had trouble sleeping, though it’s easy to imagine how the writing of ‘The Sandman,’ first published in 1818 in a collection entitled, aptly enough, The Night Pieces, might have troubled his rest of the author. “Something terrible has entered my life,” writes Nathaniel to his dear friend Lothario—the first part of the story is delivered through a series of letters. He recounts a childhood marked by his mother’s nightly demands that he be off to bed lest the sandman come and find him, and indeed, he hears him mounting the stairs as he lay awake in the dark. This sandman is eventually discovered to be a lawyer—like Hoffmann—and colleague of Nathaniel’s father, a man with hairy hands who scares children away with the mere threat of his touch, “a repellant, spectral monster bringing misery, distress and earthly and eternal ruination wherever he went.” Nathaniel believes him to be the murderer of his father. Now Nathaniel is an adult student, living in another city, but he claims the sandman has reappeared in his life, posing as a seller of barometers.

Hoffmann, with friends

Clara is Lothario’s sister and Nathaniel’s fiancée. She reads the letter intended for her brother and writes back to Nathaniel, assuring him in so many words that he’s basically just a little crazy. She suggests that he simply endeavour to “be cheerful.” But Nathaniel’s caught up in something clearly beyond Clara’s understanding. He’s convinced his will is subject to some power mysterious and vast. He’s confronted again by the barometer seller, who covers a table in glasses, and later telescopes, one of which is purchased by Nathaniel, who begins to feel foolish about his suspicions and becomes fascinated by the object. And it strikes me as interesting that this fascination with seeing, specifically with seeing through the aid of a mechanical object, is what seems to lead Nathaniel to his downfall. He falls in love with another woman, one not so cheerful as Clara, but whose strange stillness is transfixing. She’s more like a coveted object than a person. Something inside of Nathaniel begins to split apart. The ending of ‘The Sandman’ is rather ambiguous, and brilliantly chilling. It’s referenced at length in Freud’s ‘The Uncanny.’

Grave of Hoffmann

Hoffmann himself has been characterized as a guy with two distinct faces, and the theme of man’s dual nature is given further expression in ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry,’ his most famous story, one often considered the prototype for detective fiction—it predates Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ by 20 years. It certainly must be the first example of this odd convention of having mysteries solved by old ladies—its title character petitions numerous local authorities to reconsider their assumptions about the murder of a celebrated maker of jewelry named Cardillac in 1680 Paris. Cardillac is actually the story’s most memorable character, with Hoffmann’s portrait compelling us to draw parallels between virtuosity and villainy, art and evil. Cardillac claims to have been followed all his life by an “evil star,” and we start to see how the jewels he so admires twinkle just like that heavenly eye. Of course ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry’ isn’t terribly macabre, which is what I’ve been in the mood for and, with Halloween approaching, what I aim to steer you toward. But it led me to finally read a horror classic I’d previously neglected, one regarded as the definitive narrative investigation into the multiplicities of self, and the beast within.

Portraits of Stevenson by John Singer Sargent

Imagine you have an old friend so beloved to yourself, held in such high esteem by others, that were he to change radically, to alter his behaviour in a wildly grotesque fashion, you wouldn’t even recognize him standing before you. That’s one of the questions that lingers with you after reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson was inspired by the true story of Deacon Brody, respected businessman by day, burglar and thief by night. But the story of Dr Jekyll and his slow surrender to his shadow self also lends itself to being read as a parable of drug addiction, and it’s notable that after having his manuscript destroyed Stevenson rewrote the whole thing during a six-day cocaine binge. The work lends itself to so many interpretations, and nearly all of them work because Stevenson’s storytelling is so geared toward realistic detail and the rich evocations of its relationships. His is a world of bachelors, of intense male friendships, allegiances that defy law or even logic in the actions that inspire. (There’s surely a queer reading out there, too.)


“I have lost confidence in myself,” Jekyll tells his friend Utterson—another lawyer. Indeed his self is not what he thought it to be. The cruel and murderous Mr Hyde is the result of some fantastic experiment, but he was surely waiting within Jekyll’s psyche all along. It takes a drug to shake “the fortress of identity,” but the more important ingredient in Hyde’s birth was surely Jekyll’s urge to let loose his demons and to do so without punishment, to have his evil other hide in plain sight. Stevenson closes the novella with Jekyll’s own words, which elevates its horror by leaving us not with Utterson’s “I thought I knew the man…” but with something rather more frightening: the man never really knew himself.

House arrest: Paranormal Activity

She’s a nice girl, but she has a history. She’s been followed all her life by something unseen, something which makes its presence felt in other ways. Katie is an English major, good-humoured, pretty, but somehow plain. Micah is a day trader with a large house for them to share. He’s got average guy looks, style and attitude, and an average guy’s fear of commitment. Everything about Katie, Micah and the house they occupy is so rigorously ordinary it’s nearly anonymous. There’s almost no décor to speak of. They don’t have photos on their computer desktops. But we know people like this, who like things new and clean and comfortably boring. Their relationship is founded on such unspoken acceptance of the status quo. Their characterless home becomes a blank slate upon which fear can slowly spread across.

Everything we see and hear in Paranormal Activity is transmitted through Micah’s video camera. There are noises in the night. Soon there will be movement. A sober psychic will visit, but he claims what they’ve got here’s a demon, and he’s strictly a ghost man. He gives them the number of a good demonologist, but the demonologist is out of town and they have to wait, with only Micah’s camera, an occult guidebook, and a Ouija board for protection. Of course they have each other, but their nerves are getting mutually rattled and, despite Katie’s repeated protests, Micah won’t stop taunting whatever is stalking her. Micah’s cocky—he thinks he knows how the movie is going to end. You could say Paranormal Activity is a parable of martial anxiety. Micah regards his camera as a sort of erotic appendage. He asks Katie to kiss it. Micah wants to get busy on camera, but Katie isn’t willing to consummate. Micah jokes that they’re engaged to be engaged, which is another way of saying that the force of Katie’s domesticating presence may be scarier to him than any malevolent demon.

Orin Peli’s micro-budget debut, arriving in theatres ten years after The Blair Witch Project, an obvious precursor both in form and marketing strategies, is flawed in several ways but perfectly ingenious nonetheless. It succumbs, like that other Blair Witch offspring [REC], to the habit of over-explaining the persistence of the running camera. It distracts with questions as to why this nice, if troubled young woman wants to be with this idiot, whose callousness is overstated. The film would benefit immensely from shaving off the last 30 seconds or so, when the sudden intrusion of corny horror movie effects sucks the air out of the documentary verisimilitude. (This ending, shot after Peli’s original cut was completed, was reportedly suggested by Steven Spielberg, an early fan and instrumental in the film’s distribution.) But Paranormal Activity still works, at times brilliantly so.


The most inspired shot in the whole thing is the one repeated over and over, one that almost echoes Michael Haneke or David Lynch. Micah’s camera is set up to monitor their bedroom while the couple sleeps. The results are mostly static, which is the masterstroke. Our eyes dart between the people sleeping, the gloom beyond the bedroom door, and the in-camera clock, which speeds up for expediency and then slows down just when that dreaded something is going to happen. Was that a murmur? A shadow? Was that just a breeze? This anticipation is what bad dreams are made of.

It bears comparison to The Strangers, a movie with an unusually large gap between the eloquence of its premise and the inanity of its resolution. Like The Strangers, Paranormal Activity concerns a couple at a turning point in their relationship, isolated in a single location, their anxiety seeming to manifest as an intruder determined to get inside. In a sense the entire story becomes a sort of sex act, or slow rape. The intruder, the ostensible demon, penetrates the house little by little, lubricating the cavity, if you will, until it’s made its way fully inside, fusing the alliance between sex and death inherent in these stories. But unlike many stories of this kind, Paranormal Activity understands the importance of restraint. And it doesn’t climax early.

Waiting for Hashem: A Serious Man

It’s an unlikely turning point, this scene in The Man Who Wasn’t There, one of the richest, most underappreciated of the Coen Brothers’ films. Tony Shalhoub’s Freddy Riedenschneider, a lawyer in love with mystifying elocution, dazzling ideas, and the art of distraction—in other words, theatre—presents his client, on trail for murder, with a philosophical argument he believes will form the lynchpin in their case: a thing changes when you look at it. Sunlight beams down upon his upturned face as he savours his discovery of paradox. His presentation finished, he then abruptly leaves the room.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I keep thinking of The Man Who Wasn’t There as the natural companion to A Serious Man, the Coens’ new film, opening today in Toronto, about one Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, wonderful), a Jewish physics teacher and family man swept up in spiritual crisis 1967 Minneapolis. Sure, both feature a largely passive protagonist caught up in a torrent of troubles. “But I didn’t do anything!” is Larry’s recurring plea. Both are period pieces about middleclass people with unsatisfying marriages living in the suburbs. But more integrally these are the films that come closest to expressing the Coens’ particular take on the human condition, life as something perpetually mysterious and maddeningly unmoored, where chaos is never vanquished but merely ebbs and flows, where parallels and ostensible signs can’t be dependably mined for meaning. “Please, accept the mystery!” a character asks Larry. Dreams deceive dreamers because they seem so real in the moment. Voices echo from one scene into another like yelps into the void. There’s a moment, less flamboyant than Riedenschneider’s but still pretty fun, where Larry tries to explain Schrödinger’s cat to an auditorium full of students, behind him a blackboard of comically titanic proportions covered in a labyrinthine mural of equation almost no one could possibly understand. You can never be certain if the cat’s alive or dead, Larry tells his class, but you still have to explain it on the midterm.

A Serious Man is also like The Man Who Wasn’t There in that, no matter what the rigorously irreverent Coens themselves might say—some general advice: never trust the artist to interpret the work—it reveals the filmmakers at their most discreetly compassionate. The escalating woes of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) may be rife with black comedy and caricature, but his struggle feels genuine. He’s condescended to by several supporting characters, not by the authors. Maybe—and this is a strict maybe—this is because it’s their most autobiographical work. The setting is their hometown; Larry’s occupation is the same as that of the Coens’ father; Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff, deadpan and very funny), about to bar mitzvah, is roughly the same age the Coens would have been at the time, and we can only presume his pot-addled, utterly detached participation in the rituals of his Jewish community mirrors the Coens’. Maybe it also reflects something of Ethan Coen’s undergraduate studies in philosophy—his thesis was on Wittgenstein—but no matter how circular, inconclusive or just plain baffling Larry’s soliciting of advice from a series of rabbis might be, we’re not made to feel that he’s ridiculous or pitiful for having searched, any more than it might be ridiculous or pitiful for him to seek comfort in the desperate housewife next door (Amy Landecker, blearily sexy), who he first spies sunbathing from his roof one sunny afternoon. He fiddles with the antenna as Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Coming Back To Me’ seems to suddenly drift across the airwaves, lending tenderness to this scene of accidental voyeurism.

Characteristic Coen humour, often verging on non sequitur, abounds. There are jokes about incessant cyst draining or the inexplicable unseemliness of a bar called the North Dakota. There are instances of culture clash that toy with stereotype, such as Larry’s struggle to reason with a Korean student who presumes bribery to be acceptable practice in American schools. The cast, superb and devoid of name talent, speaks to the Coens’ impeccable eye for faces, not to mention ankles, necks, and the hairiest ears I’ve ever seen. Larry’s wife (Sari Lennick), wound so tight she looks like her head’s about to explode any second, seems to be leaving him for Allen Ginsberg (Fred Melamed, reassuring, and creepy). Bodies wordlessly convey repression, especially that of Uncle Arthur (Richard Kind, endearingly childish), whose posture renders him a peeled hard-boiled egg with flippers. So the Coen carnival show is in full effect, but it strikes me as a carnival of the community centre, oddly affectionate, deeply recognizable—to Jews and goys alike—and brimming with sly observations on how familiarity can suddenly become terrifying and strange when the balance of life alarmingly slips over. Larry’s troubles don’t really abate. Indeed, the film ends with fresh threats looming on the horizon. This cliffhanger is a legitimate finale however. There is resolution, even if it urges us to accept uncertainty as life’s sole certainty.

One last thought. It concerns coincidence, a big theme in A Serious Man. There was one other excellent American film released this year that also dealt with a major crisis in the life of a man living in a Jewish community. It was called Two Lovers, it starred Joaquin Phoenix, and is it just me or, from certain angles at least, and especially when smiling, do Phoenix and Stuhlbarg not look very alike? Is Hashem trying to tell us something? Talk amongst yourselves.

Arrested development: The Boys Are Back

Ace sportswriter Joe Warr (Clive Owen) left England, a wife and a child to live in Australia, the home of a lovely equestrienne whom he knocked up and fell in love with. But the equestrienne unexpectedly dies far too young and too quickly, and grief-stricken Joe’s left with a slightly weird little boy (Nicholas McAnulty) he doesn’t really know how to raise. Before long his first child, now a teen (George MacKay), suddenly decides to come down under to spend an indeterminate period with his long-lost pa, too. Joe, now pulling double duty as a full-timer, finds he’s in need of a philosophy of parenting. He opts for JUST SAY YES—the motto appears on his refrigerator in magnetic letters—and sets about proving that slovenly permissiveness and playtime all-the-time can be both fun and therapeutic.

Of course disaster awaits, though the predictable and perfunctory disaster is actually pretty minor, its fallout racking up a lot of air miles more than anything else. Adapted by Allan Cubitt from Simon Carr’s memoir, The Boys Are Back is somewhat shapeless, meandering its way through Joe’s widower’s crisis without ever really being as hard on the guy as it seems to think its being. Joe’s irresponsible about a lot of things and reveals himself to be a poor negotiator with both adults and children. He lets the little one run wild and do belly flops into hotel jacuzzis. He stamps off in a huff when his mother-in-law doesn’t offer to help him out at a moment’s notice. He does a lousy job of courting another single parent, roping her into babysitting before he ever takes her out on a date. So his flaws are laid out for us to survey and cluck our tongues at. Yet somewhere between the condensation of Carr’s book into movie form and Shine director Scott Hicks’ brimming affections for the all-too-likable Owen and the golden glow of the Australian countryside, urgency and a desirable edge evaporates.

At least Owen, himself a dad, not to mention the film’s executive producer, truly does seem to immerse himself into all this. I found myself resisting The Boys Are Back and then warming up to it, mainly due to Owen’s commitment to connecting with his young costars. We’re meant to look down on Joe’s refusal to judge and play the strict patriarch as much as we’re invited to smile along with it when it’s all harmless shenanigans. But the most interesting moments actually arise from Joe’s counterintuitive acceptance of his children’s more erratic behaviour, such as when McAnulty is disturbingly obtuse and unaffected by his mother’s death. Hicks frames a lot of scenes very prettily and softens their effect further by bathing them in cocoon-like songs from Sigur Rós, but when Owen’s face becomes stone cold and withdrawn, or when that icy exterior breaks and we sense a decision is made before it’s actually announced, something works here in spite of itself. You can probably tell that I like Owen very much as an actor, but I’m still not sure what to make of his career.

When movie stars should send screenwriters to jail: Law Abiding Citizen

Just before Clarence Darby (Christian Stolte) jabs a blade into his guts, just before Darby proceeds to rape and kill his wife and do about the same to his little girl, Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) hears this fat, sweaty, slovenly, drug-addled, disgusting pervert-ogre whisper in his ear, “You can’t fight fate.” Even by the standards of the overcharged Hollywood thriller this is ultra-portentous. Clyde takes it to heart. He stews over it for ten years, during which time Darby’s accomplice awaits execution while Darby himself does three years and goes free as thanks from the DA for ratting his buddy out. For ten years Clyde gets stoked on the ineffectuality of American justice and concocts a whopper of a plan to set things straight.

The central conceit of Law Abiding Citizen, that grief and frustration turns a contented family man and otherwise non-psychopathic maniac into Hannibal Lecter on steroids, could only have ever worked as utter camp. As an ostensibly serious, ostensibly engaging, ostensibly dark and brooding thriller about thorny issues of crime, punishment and bureaucracy, it’s a mind-numbingly absurd travesty of a movie. Clyde kidnaps Darby and slowly, messily tortures him to death, making imaginative use of power tools a poison isolated from the liver of a Caribbean puffer fish. Of course! It’s only his opening act. He gets thrown into maximum security and his rampage only escalates. Somehow he keeps exacting his flamboyant, baroque feats of violent revenge from captivity, gradually killing off anyone with even the most tangential connection to his case. Except for Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), the attorney who made the deal with Darby. Nick gets to watch as the whole house of cards collapses, wondering when he or his wife and daughter will get iced. Clyde and Nick play cat and mouse.

You don’t need a degree in law, psychology or engineering to balk at the mountain of risible improbability Law Abiding Citizen hinges on. Genius serial killers are among the most tiresome tropes, but Clyde Shelton and his reign of terror go far beyond the usual level of artifice and dumbness. Yet even if the basic story, which comes courtesy of Street Kings and Ultraviolet scribe Kurt Wimmer, weren’t so stupid, the details too feel all wrong, from our glimpses of Nick’s cardboard family life to the inner chambers of play-cynical Philadelphia lawmakers. The film’s only reason for existing is to try and keep you from guessing what moronic plot twist it’ll unleash next, until you finally realize that this thriller is really a horror movie, torture porn of sorts. It wants to be tough, I guess, but it’s really just crude, very, very silly, and more than a little sick.

Butler is on some kind of a roll. Here’s a sampling: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, RocknRolla, The Ugly Truth. Dude’s been in some of the worst shit I’ve had to sit through over the last few years. I’m inclined to indulge a guy trying to move up in the system a little, but to what end? Does his producer’s credit mean to imply that Law Abiding Citizen is his fucking dream project? Does he secretly fantasize being confined to a prison from which he can slaughter his own career by remote control?

One last stray observation. There's an important early sequence where Darby's condemned accomplice gets executed by the state. As the sequence builds to its climax we keep cutting back and forth between the execution and a musical recital where Jamie Foxx's daughter plays the cello. Followers of this blog wonder with me: were the makers of Law Abiding Citizen studying The Walking Dead, or what?

What the Dead Know

Imagine you’re unjustly locked up for second-degree murder. You were just protecting your wife. You don’t know your own strength. It was a freak thing. You’re a musician, an aesthete, soft-spoken, demure by nature, a gentle soul with a shuffling walk and the slight lunge of those ready to topple into the grave. You get out of the pen, you’re womanless, hard-up, turned away from some big shot you were promised would give you a little work. You walk the streets in a beat-up hat and too-short baggy trousers when you meet this guy, friendly as can be. He recognizes you from the papers, remembers your case, knows you got a raw deal. He buys you a coffee, says he’s a PI, offers some work, kid stuff, just watch a house for a while, track the gentleman’s movements. The catch is the gentleman in question is the very judge that sent you up. Seems a little queer, but you can’t be picky. You’re too trusting, or fatalistic, to know when you’re being set up.


That’s the lowdown for John Ellman, the hero of The Walking Dead (1936), and if I’m trying to put you in his raggedy shoes it’s only because he’s embodied by Boris Karloff with such texture and compassion that you can’t help but sympathize—even if you never get the full story about that earlier killing. Ellman takes the fall for a mafia hit and gets the chair—a novelty of the period and much in the press. But somewhere a pair of young lovers who witnessed the crime lose sleep over the fact that they never came to Ellman’s defense. They finally confess, but it’s too late. The news gets to the prison just as Ellman gets the juice. But wait, the lovers are scientists, working for a visionary experimenting with reviving the dead. So Ellman corpse is sent directly to the lab, hooked up to electrodes, and Karloff’s given a major dose of déjà vu, five years after Frankenstein (31). He’s alive, again, remote, as though swallowed by completely by the melancholy that hounded him in his previous life. He doesn’t talk much, so the question lingers: what does he remember of death?

Directed by Michael Curtiz, still far from Casablanca (42) but in excellent form in a flurry of prestige Bs, The Walking Dead is a haunting picture. It’s riddled with artifice and coincidence as our Lazarus begins to quietly enact his wrath, yet it’s endowed with spectral beauty and a deep emotional current thanks mainly to Karloff, as well as an inspired feeling for musical accompaniment—Ellman’s final request is to have a cello player score his death march—and a spare lighting and production design that looks back to German Expressionism and forward to noir. The story also looks forward to The Dead Zone (83), David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about the loneliness that grips those back from the void and carrying secret knowledge.

The Walking Dead is by far the best thing in Warner’s Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics box, though Zombies on Broadway (45) is also very worthwhile. A horror-comedy that’s mostly comedy, it finds Wally Brown and Alan Carney’s New York talent agents coerced by a showbiz mobster into going down to a Caribbean isle to fetch a genuine zombie. Lured by a leggy American showgirl, they eventually find Bela Lugosi secretly cooking up a zombie formula. He fools them into digging their own graves and spending the night in his castle and, you know, hilarity ensues. It’s actually a fairly entertaining bit of hysterical hokum if you can stomach the crude racial gags, but more importantly for classic horror fans it represents a very weird effort to capitalize on a previous hit. Just like Lugosi’s zombies, my eyes popped out of my head when I recognized not only Sir Lancelot, once again playing a calypso singer serenading newcomers with sweetly forbidding ballads, but also Darby Jones, once again playing a shirtless giant zombie. Both were pivotal to the unforgettable spell of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (42), the second film to emerge from producer Val Lewton’s legendary low-budget horror unit at RKO. Their reprisals here are far less distinguished, though at least Jones gets his comeuppance this time around.

Frankenstein 1970 (58) features Karloff as the original mad scientist’s great-great grumpy grandson. In need of funds to buy an atomic reactor so he can make more monsters, he allows a Hollywood film crew to use his castle. The industry satire is all stale cliché, the story is limpid and limited, the monster’s head in wrapped up in so many bandages he looks like Gumby post-surgery. It’s genuinely curious that director Howard Koch chooses to cover most of the scenes in long, unbroken takes and wide shots, though they only make things drag even more. Though it’s got Lugosi, Karloff and Peter Lorre on board, You’ll Find Out (40) seems mainly a showcase for radio personality Kay Kyser and his College of Musical Knowledge. It’s not much of a horror movie, though it did seem really horrible. I had to shut off the TV and run screaming.

Closer and closer readings: Farber on Film

An essential volume on any film-lover's shelf, the new Farber on Film: the Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (Library of America, $40 US/$50 CAN) was edited by Robert Polito, who authored a terrific Jim Thompson biography some years back called Savage Art. Farber died last year at the age of 91. He hadn’t written about film since the 70s, when he dedicated himself full-time to painting. Yet his perspective retains a colossal vitality. He wasn’t bent on prescience. On the contrary, he was rigorous about seeing movies as they played to their moment in time. (It’s why he was wrong about the protagonist’s motivation in Taxi Driver—Travis Bickle’s gnomic personal obsessions have aged better than Farber’s suggestion that he should have been driven by pure need for celebrity.) But Farber immersed himself in films with an observational prowess that the rest of us are still trying to catch up to.

Taxi Driver

As promised in the subtitle, this doorstop delivers the whole course of Farber’s critical career, nearly 800 pages worth. The book has an exhaustive index and lends itself to random browsing, but there’s something cathartic in reading from cover-to-cover, in watching Farber develop his sensibility through the 40s in regular columns for The New Republic or The Nation before seeing that sensibility come to full fruition in the expansive essays that populated his revered late collection Negative Space. As Polito notes in his superb introduction, “Farber is perhaps the only American critic of modernism to write as a modernist.” From the first sentence Farber is cantankerous and muscular and eager to push the language. From the first he’s broad in vision, weaving the state of wartime US politics and culture, the state of film industry and film art, into his arresting, provocative prose. From the first he thwarts the urge toward quick-fix criticism so that you can’t even tell if he likes something, and who cares when he’s drawing us always closer to really seeing and hearing what the movies are doing, what they can do, what they don’t do, what they should.

Double Indemnity

The title Negative Space is apt: Farber can be pretty damned negative at times—at first blush you might wonder if he actually likes movies—while his roaming senses, trained by painting and photography, not to mention sports, always peruse the whole of the filmic space, digging into corners, probing the cavities, sometimes at the expense of certain elements we often cling to as being essential, like theme. While getting high on his championing of underdog works like Moontide or The Set-Up or anything produced by Val Lewton, my head spun and my jaw dropped when Farber, at times given to contrarianism, laid into Double Indemnity, The Magnificent Ambersons, Laura, My Darling Clementine, The Third Man, Sunset Blvd with such merciless, surgical precision. But Farber's readings feel more alive, more actively wrestling with these films and what they represent—where they fall in the culture—than the vast bulk of comfortably reverential, historically assured writing they’ve generated from hundreds of other writers—myself included. True, Farber’s take on Rashomon feels excessively sharpened by preconceived suspicions about Kurosawa’s flashy technique while basically ignoring the dark tide of uncertainty that undercuts its every scene, just as his dismissal of Billy Wilder’s cynical adoration of tough-talking lowlifes seems the product of Farber’s general repugnance toward Wilder’s employment of gloss. But unlike every other critic who’s ever used that laziest of pejoratives, “arty,” Farber invested the first half of his career in defining precisely what sort of threat studio era “artiness” posed.

High Sierra

While working through Farber’s ongoing reports from the American cinema of the 40s and 50s there were times I wondered if his division of films into the economical/unassuming/action-driven and the pretentious/Oscar-baiting/self-consciously flashy wasn’t too reductive, not to mention highly oriented toward, and more forgiving of, what can’t help but feel like an almost exclusively masculine sensibility. Yet the narrative inherent in Farber on Film, the long and dogged establishing of a perspective, builds in increments, shaping itself through reflection, reassessment, comparison and cultural change, until we arrive at the first definitive statement of Farber’s thesis-in-progress, the 1962 essay ‘White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.’ “A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” White Elephant Art, by contrast, is plagued by “a fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of a film.” Farber zeroes in on something that can manifest as many things for different viewers: spontaneity, abandon, risk, freshness, process-over-product, attentiveness to the full measure of what film can access, openness to accident. It also favours acting that seizes our fascination by being nothing more than, as he writes in ‘The Decline of the Actor,’ “simply curiosity flexing itself,” that prizes the fleeting exhilaration of something as ephemeral as Bogart glancing up at a street sign when he didn’t have to; the way Ida Lupino "works closely and guardedly to the camera, retracting into herself, steals scenes from Bogart at his most touching"; by the presence of Liv Ullman, "one of those rare passive Elegants in acting who can leave the screen to another actor and still score." The Elephant vs. Termite perspective found Farber embracing B-movies, where filmmakers were better able to wriggle free of the front office and quietly produce subversive wonders in the margins of often seemingly negligible material. It found Farber embracing sly supporting performances that could almost function as critiques of the pompous leads surrounding them. From ‘Pish-Tush’: “Movies that have become classics… are never more savage and uninhibited than in those moments when a whirring energy is created in the back of the static mannered acting of some great star.” But while Farber’s dichotomy remained in place, what compelled Farber changed radically as the 1960s changed assumptions about what might constitute artiness, termites and elephants. His gradual admiration and rich appreciations for Godard pays off all the more for the insights of his early skepticism. Defenses of Anthony Mann or Howard Hawks became defenses of artists as potentially "arty" as Chantal Ackerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Werner Herzog. He's actually quite friendly to Easy Rider, and to Terrence Malick. And far from cultivating a strictly male perspective, Farber gradually began to co-author essays with his wife Patricia Patterson. Among some of the best late essays are exhaustive assessments of Herzog, Luis Buñuel and Nicolas Roeg.

Farber, with typewriter and white-out

What’s great about Farber on Film is that it emphasizes how good criticism takes nothing for granted. Writing an essay called ‘The Subverters’ in 1966, when film studies departments and popular critics were busy trying to build a canon, “to bring some order and shape to film history,” Farber declared such efforts “doomed to failure because of the subversive nature of the medium: the flash-bomb vitality that one scene, actor, or technician injects across the grain of a film.” This persistent unruliness of movies is among the things that make it so seductive to some and infuriating to others. The medium is all about motion, and it refuses to sit still and politely concede to definitive, settled judgments. So Farber moved along with it. His opinions were strong and ruthless—and always open to adjustment. He’s one of the only critics whose reviews the reviewed filmmakers—that all filmmakers—can actually learn from, to say nothing of audiences. I know I’m a better, more fulfilled, more stimulated film watcher for reading him. I only hope it can make me a better film critic, too.

Dancing to the end of love: Bright Star

The opening credits hover over a close-up of needle going through fabric. The image speaks to the diligence and nimbleness needed to craft clothes, poetry or prolonged, unconsummated desire. It also lets us know that Bright Star will diligently hunker down for the worm’s-eye view should it yield another sharpened physical detail for writer/director Jane Campion to weave into this tapestry-like romance, something best surrendered to as with a current. Just lie on your back and watch the patterns unfold.

John Keats died young, and if his poetry went woefully underappreciated during his life at least it was redeemed by the not easily earned devotion of its muse. Bright Star, though inspired by Andrew Motion’s Keats biography, isn’t about Keats. It doesn’t burn much celluloid trying to turn writerly brooding or hand-numbing penmanship into cinema. Its protagonist is instead young middleclass seamstress Fanny Brawne, the first girl in all of Hamstead Heath to have a triangular pleated mushroom collar. When she first meets Keats—the year is 1818—she challenges the reverence aimed at the poet’s vocation, championing handsome, useful, innovative and well-made clothing over delicate words of limited practical power. The antagonism between Fanny (Abbie Cornish) and Keats (Ben Whishaw) is kept honest through the ubiquity of Keats sidekick Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), a Scottish poet as big, burly and gruff as Keats was elfin, diminutive and soft-spoken. Their intriguingly un-straightforward triangle is just one of many forces working against the fulfillment of Fanny and Keats, another being Keats’ poverty. But as imagined here, theirs was a love emboldened by ceaseless tension. The film’s vivacity is the product of a harmonious collaboration between sensitive camerawork, production design, scoring and actors, at least one of whom giving the first outstanding work of what promises to be an outstanding career.

Cornish’s performance is of the sort where you can’t decide whether it’s a case of a role being perfectly cast or whether the actor’s invested the role so generously with some secret culled from within that she’s made alternate interpretations unthinkable. That confusion of unfamiliar and overwhelming emotions that clutches youth can be read in Cornish’s face and distracted hands especially. Imperious and anxious, she has the sort of face that when directed at you makes you uncertain if her gaze is one of derision or desire. What isn’t ambiguous is that you have her complete attention. Complimenting Cornish, Whishaw picks up where his Dylan-via-Rimbuad in I’m Not There left off, every smile teasing, every adoring glance half-misted over with the young poet’s inclination to admire Beauty in general as to recognize it in the specifics of his lover’s person. It works very well, while Schneider seems to growing into himself as an actor more and more—he’s more suited to this sort of bullying and jealous dreamer than he was to the agonized young lover in All the Real Girls.

So our stars are exceptional in their roles as young lovers, leaving us with the more difficult question of whether or not this sort of young love translates into exceptional movies, a question Bright Star doesn’t easily resolve. It seems perfectly unconcerned with the proscribed meter of classical storytellng, but the rhythm it adopts instead is almost unintentionally lulling, swerving from bliss to ennui, going up and down with young love’s customary tumult. The film possesses no shortage of moments sublime or nearly so, but these moments don’t add up to a great deal of momentum. So be it. Swooning heights of beauty and feeling trump structural rigour, and that’s fine by me.

What Campion excels at here is fidelity to the subjective experience of her characters, which requires both the acknowledgement of societal limitations—such as the presumptions made by Brown and others that young women are poorly fit to comprehend poetry—and a way of evoking sensuality that embraces the transcendental. In dealing with the latter challenge, Bright Star seems to share a certain kinship with the films of Terrence Malick, The New World most especially, not only because of its star-crossed period romance but because of its grounding in the celebration of nature found in poetry. Chalk it up to mimetic license: a poetic movie about poetry, and one teeming with loveliness.

Das Kapital und die Komödie

The American present. Commercial pilots are living off food stamps or working in donut shops. A Pennsylvania private juvenile detention centre cuts a deal with the county and keeps kids locked up for months on end for talking back or smoking weed. Corporations take out secret life insurance policies on their employees making the corporation the sole beneficiary when the employee dies, while the family of the deceased spirals into debt trying to cover hospital and funeral expenses. Financial institutions ask for bailouts—you may have heard about this one—while suddenly laid-off workers can’t even get paid for their final shifts. How can such corruption be tolerated? Is there a single overwhelming force facilitating all these aberrations from the Western democratic ideal? Michael Moore has an answer, and it’s a whopper. Let’s just say Francis Fukuyama was soooo wrong.

Coming 20 years after Roger & Me, Moore’s celebrated debut as documentary filmmaker, Capitalism: A Love Story displays much of what makes Moore’s films powerful and enduring in their way. The dumpy, tirelessly muckraking son of a Flint, Michigan autoworker, Moore is the self-appointed spokesman for disgruntled blue collar America, not a theorist with a cushy university post but a resourceful and ambitious people-guy who seems to genuinely like talking to people. (Should they be willing to talk to him, which is not always the case.) What Moore has to say is impassioned, funny, highly entertaining, shamelessly tear-jerking, sometimes insightful, and not especially coherent. In its loosely related assembly of true stories of economic injustice, Capitalism is an engaging and compassionate cri de coeur. In its layman’s explication of certain mystifying financial trends and baffling feats of white collar crime, it goes some distance—a short, but still admirable distance—toward making issues of vital importance to everyone a little more accessible. In its attempts to diagnose the singular underlying cause behind all of these stories the film isn’t just an over-simplification but a confused and opportunistic reading of what ultimately feels like an ideological bogeyman. It’s funny. I’m fairly sure I’m on Moore’s side. I’m not sure I know what the hell he’s getting at.

The messiness of Moore’s argument is evident in his roping of everybody from Roosevelt to Obama to Wallace Shawn to Jesus into his back-up band. He actually gets a bunch of priests to say that capitalism is un-Christian!, which I guess might make sense if interpreted as a bald play on the spiritual conscience of the Christian Right—hardly a terribly Catholic bunch—though I have a hard time seeing them in line at the multiplex. When Moore finally gets around to ideological alternatives his discussion of socialism is equally vague and inclusive, offering no clear positive examples of other nations making a sustained go at it and mostly just falling back on championing labour unions. The examples he offers of average Americans overcoming economic injustice are truly inspiring, but they don’t actually show how capitalism in its essence is an inherent obstacle. Still, you should see the movie. You’ll have a good time with it and quite possibly learn something from the details. Just don’t expect to walk away with a thesis. The theorists were always better with those anyway.