So, I'm not the first blogger to discover how easy it is to get out of the blogging habit. Let me try to get back in with a couple of movie reviews - both must-sees, both by Mexican directors, both about finding hope and something to live for in a messed-up, war-torn world.
Pan's Labyrinth, which will surely win the foreign-language film Oscar, is a rare example of using state-of-the-art special effects to tell a story more concerned with serious philosophical themes than with action scenes. It's the end of the Spanish Civil War - the Francoists have taken over, but some Loyalists still carry on the fight. A ten-year-old girl travels with her pregnant mother to join their stepfather, a sinister army captain commanding a military base. As her daily life becomes brutal and fearful, the girl discovers a labyrinth which takes her to a wonderland beneath the earth - a faun tells her that she is a reincarnated princess, and she can return to her fantasy kingdom by completing three mysterious tasks. Giant frogs, fairies and monsters share screen time with interrogations, espionage and battles. Writer/Director Guillermo del Toro finds the right balance between his art side ( Cronos, The Devil's Backbone) and his pulp scifi/fantasy side (Hellboy, Blade II). Pan's Labyrinth is a hugely entertaining movie, and, it seems to me, a deeply spiritual one, pondering the elements of humanity that, despite the madness of everyday life, go on forever.
Children of Men takes place in another time of madness - the near future, when a plague of infertility means that no children have been born on earth for 18 years. Most of the world has dissolved into chaos, but England hangs onto sanity by becoming a dictatorship, sternly cracking down on immigrants from other parts of the world trying to find safety in England. Clive Owen is a disillusioned bureaucrat who finds himself with the job of accompanying the first newly pregnant woman through a dangerous land to safety. Like much science fiction, Children of Men talks about the future in order to slyly talk about today.
Director Alfonso Cuaron did not get an Oscar nomination for Best Director, but I think he should have - in fact, I think he should have won (Sorry Marty). Cuaron is the anti-Michael Bay - as the action scenes heat up, he doesn't increase cutting; he uses long, long takes that required an massive amount of preparation, and the result is an immediacy and intimacy with the characters that modern action scenes rarely have. There's one scene about midway through, shot mainly from inside a car, that involves fire, shooting, motorcycles, stuntwork, high speed and, in the middle of it, outstanding acting from Owen. It evokes a question rarely heard in this digital age - how the hell did they do that?
Thanks to the video game Guitar Hero, my son Ryan has become enamored of several classic rock songs, most of all Iron Man by Black Sabbath. I'm sure most of you can hear that groaning opening chord right now. It's featured in a Nissan Truck commercial, it's become a staple of high school marching bands, VH1 named it the best metal song of all time.
So, tell me - what's it about?
Yeah, that never occurred to me either. Sometimes, that's not a question you want to ask; a catchy song can be ruined if you notice, on the hundredth hearing, that the words are stupid. But when Ryan asked me to get him a copy of the song, I felt compelled to check out the lyrics, to make sure they weren't going to poison his 12-year-old mind. Turns out it's a mini-science fiction epic:
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?
Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
Well just pass him there
Why should we even care?
He was turned to steel
In the great magnetic field
Where he traveled time
For the future of mankind
Nobody wants him
He just stares at the world
Planning his vengeance
That he will soon unfurl
Now the time is here
For iron man to spread fear
Vengeance from the grave
Kills the people he once saved
Nobody wants him
They just turn their heads
Nobody helps him
Now he has his revenge
Heavy boots of lead
Fills his victims full of dread
Running as fast as they can
Iron man lives again!
The song tells the tale of a man who travels back in time to warn mankind of an impending apocalypse, but in the process is 'turned to steel' and therefore into an 'iron man' (although technically iron is not the same as steel). This form leaves him in a non-responsive state in which no one can tell if he is even alive. Everyone ignores him, and lying there in his metal shell, he plans vengeance on the people who don't acknowledge all he went through to try to save them. Finally, he does indeed kill everyone, fulfilling the prophecy he was originally trying to prevent.
I don't know about you, but the song is certainly changed for me. I'm not sure it's for the better, though...
There are no science fiction stories in this week's random ten, but there is a good deal of 60's rock and soul.
1. All That We Perceive - Thievery Corporation
2. The Bird - Shawn Colvin
3. Shake - Otis Redding
4. Get Back - The Beatles
5. Fool's Paradise - Sam Cooke
6. 7 and 7 is - Love
7. I Can't Explain - The Who
8. Rifle Range - Blondie
9. Uncertain Smile - The The
10. Am I The Same Girl? - Barbara Acklin
Elvis and David Bowie weren't the only ones to have a birthday yesterday. My brother Bill also had one, and a big one too - 50. Last weekend, I went to a semi-surprise party (he knew something was afoot, but not how big it would be) at his house in Albany, and it was great to see people from different parts of his life (and my life too). But the capper was this powerpoint presentation put together by our sister Maryjo. Enjoy the different hairstyles.
And how old am I, you may ask? Oh, much, much less than 50.
In the early eighties, I lived on Long Island, worked in New York City, and did what I could to take advantage of the city's music scene. One of my best friends, John Lee, introduced me to a guy named Eric Schmuckler, who was one of those passionate music lovers that you come across rarely. While I just liked music a lot - OK, obsessively - Eric was the kind of fan who really made it part of his life, who seemed to know something about every worthwhile kind of music, and loved to share his knowledge. After I moved away, I heard from him occasionally in the email circle of my NYC friends - his email address was "recordlovr".
Last week, John Lee emailed me, and said that Eric had died of cancer. He was actually diagnosed ten years ago, and at that time he was given six months to live. Cancer didn't know what it was getting into. Eric fought for a decade, and his love for music, as well as his wife and two children, gave him the strength and energy. John wrote "his love for music was unstoppable; despite his impending fate, he was on ebay ordering cds, shopping for tickets to Broadway shows, having a ball editing his own obituary.
This week's random ten is for Eric; but first, here's a song that makes me think of him, by the Ramones, a band with some other tough New Yorkers who died too young:
1. California 2005 - Phantom Planet
2. If It Takes All Night - Roxy Music
3. Bohemian Like You - The Dandy Warhols
4. Anastasia - Elliott Murphy
5. Sweet and Dandy Toots and the Maytals
6. Love > Building on Fire - Talking Heads
7. Hand of Fate - The Rolling Stones
8. Real Love - David Gray
9. Cowards in a Brave New World - Kim Richey
10. When the Rain Starts Falling - Johnny Copeland
Recently, I saw the movie A Scanner Darkly on DVD, and I was pleased to see that a film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story kept the original story and tone, and didn't just build an action movie around his plot ideas (see Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck et al). It made me remember that, back in my teens and twenties, Dick was an important author to me, as a pop culture author who played with philosophical ideas about the relationship between fantasy and reality, especially in an age when technology could alter the way your brain experienced the outside world. Dick wrung more changes out of the idea of virtual reality long before the concept was a familiar concept.
It occured to me that I hadn't read any Dick in a long, long time. Back in the 1980's, I had read the most famous and celebrated Dick books, and had moved into the second tier, where you never knew if a book was going to be a masterpiece, a dud, or (most often) something with good ideas that didn't work overall. I decided to try a book that I had missed in my earlier years.
Dr. Bloodmoney, written in 1966, turns out to be an after-the-bomb book. Dick paints a near-future portrait of life in San Francisco and Marin County, then drops the bombs and follows a large cast as they struggle through the early post-bomb days, and the years of building makeshift substitutes for civilization. Characters include Hoppy, a limbless handyman with robotic prostheses, whose affability hides a chilling megalomania; Walt Dangerfield, an astronaut stranded in a satellite who becomes the friendly radio host the earth comes to depend on; and Dr. Bluthgeld, the nuclear scientist whose guilt drives him completely, but secretly, insane. The portrait of a large cast of more or less decent people muddling through a hideous historical period reminds me of one of Dick's most famous books, The Man in the High Castle. Despite some harrowing descriptions, this may be the most hopeful after-the-bomb story I know; Dick believes that not even a nuclear holocaust can destroy the human connections .that civilization depends on, and can use to rebuild.
