One Day Off, One Day On

[handful_ofdust]

So, this week in fandom: The Merlin is proliferating, as I knew it would. Pretty soon it'll be everywhere. Why I should care I don't know, but...seems I do. My own annoyance is annoying me.

Anyhow--no writing yesterday, as I sort of knew there wouldn't be. Instead, Cal went to Mom's and Steve and I went to see The Unborn, which (say it together with me now) Isn't Vaguely As Bad As You've Been Told, though it does suffer mightily from having been framed specifically for what Goyer et al assume is its best demographic, ie little stick-figure chicas like Odette Yustman, their dumb friends and their dumb-but-nice boyfriends, all of whom inhabit a wish-fulfillment world of privilege and anti-intellectualism. It reminds me once more of just how much I ended up liking Stir of Echoes, especially in retrospect, because its main characters were A) working-class and B) adults with C) actual problems who were D) capable of thinking their way out of a plastic bag, especially if said bag was tightening around their head. Is this too much to ask for? That things have beginnings, middles and ends, that actions have consequences, that themes get addressed for more than five minutes after stick-figure sex? OTOH, glad to see iconography that's not Christian for once, and nice to see that faith of any sort apparently counts for something in a crunch (especially considering how fucking difficult it is to come by/maintain under pressure).

I also rented and watched Righteous Kill (not shit, but not stunning--it was written by the same dude who wrote Inside Man, and he only seems to be interested in one highly specific form of cinematic storytelling) and The Chair (a well-executed microbudget Canadian ghost story with very interesting side-pockets, particularly the subplot yoinked directly from Poes' "Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"). And I ended up buying End of the Line, a Toronto/Montreal co-pro horror movie which took top prize at FantAsia last year...it undercuts itself with some very low-cost set dec and uniformly fake-y acting, possibly a result of the director directing in his second language, but it looks damn good, moves well, and has a nice/nasty third-act sucker-punch. As ever, I think it played here once, during the TIFF; probably wouldn't've made much of an impact even if it had gotten a release, but still. Same old same old.

And what else: Oh, turns out one of my most talented former students has been making porn since he graduated; the good part is, he's built up a fair bit of gelt that way, and wants to use it to break back into "legitimate" movie-making. I remember joking about this in class as a "smart" plan of action a couple of times, but swear I had nothing to do with this general outcome. And I clocked about 500 words today going back over what I wrote on Friday, thus making it--finally--to the end of Chapter Three. I'll be doing some more planning tomorrow, and probably going back to "Strange Weight" for a while on the side, but at least I'm moving forward at a reasonable clip.

That's all, folks. I need to shut down, pack for tomorrow, get up early.

Comments

[sovay]

OTOH, glad to see iconography that's not Christian for once, and nice to see that faith of any sort apparently counts for something in a crunch (especially considering how fucking difficult it is to come by/maintain under pressure).

Dunno. I still want to see the filmmakers haunted by the cranky dybbuk of S. Ansky.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I'll have to look that up!

[sovay]

I'll have to look that up!

Ansky's The Dybbuk (1920) is worth reading. There's a straight translation by Joachim Neugroschel I recommend, and a version/adaptation by Tony Kushner (A Dybbuk) I really like; the Klezmatics did the incidental music, later released as their album Possessed (1997). My novelette "The Dybbuk in Love" is in their tradition. And I don't think Andrew Eldritch knew Ansky from a hole in the head, but I have always associated "Lucretia, My Reflection" with dybbuks: two worlds and in between . . .

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Isn't there some sort of anti-tradition which implies that girls become "possessed" by dybbuks in order to speak their minds freely, without the usual Orthodox restrictions? (I also remember I had to review an Israeli movie about a dybbuk exorcism once...it was playing up here as part of the Jewish Film Festival, but I can't recall the title. Interesting, if crude--in retrospect, it reminds me of some Nigerian blockbusters I've heard described.)

As for "Lucretia", meanwhile--ha! I love that idea. But for me, it'll always be this demented steampunk epic (I hear Empire down); that, or the theme to an HBO miniseries adaptation of Jeff Long's The Descent.;)

[sovay]

Isn't there some sort of anti-tradition which implies that girls become "possessed" by dybbuks in order to speak their minds freely, without the usual Orthodox restrictions?

I don't actually know any of the sociology around dybbuks, just the folklore. But that interpretation is not out of keeping with some presentations of Ansky's story—it is most interesting to me when there's desire from the living side as well as the dead.

[autobotsrollout.livejournal.com]

Oh, turns out one of my most talented former students has been making porn since he graduated

Is this someone other than Craig?

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

...yes. I'm not sure if you'd know him.

[autobotsrollout.livejournal.com]

Maybe, maybe not.

But you have to admit, it's kinda freakish how many of us ended up making or assisting in the making of porn.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Well, porn's a big industry, and they always need people with skillz. It's also pretty securely recession-proof. And he's from Montreal, Canada's porn capital; no, it doesn't surprise me that much.

[starvinbohemian.livejournal.com]

Righteous Kill could have been two hours of Pacino and De Niro just sitting together and staring at the camera, and I would still give it an automatic four stars. My insane love of Pacino and De Niro demands this. Lennon and McCartney (for me) indeed. :D

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you see--I'm with you on Pacino and De Niro, but I just didn't like Turk or Rooster enough to fully commit. I don't mean I didn't understand them, BTW, because I did--they weren't exactly complex. But I'd seen both actors do far better versions of similar protagonists in far more entertaining films (Pacino as Will Dormer in Insomnia, for example), and ended up in a weird place where I was A) admiring 50 Cent's acting (of all things) and B) wondering why Carla Gugino always plays such slutty, damaged people (it's like there's a special clause in her contract!).

[starvinbohemian.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree that the movie on its own merits wasn't that great. But it's Pacino and De Niro. ;)

[sovay]

But I'd seen both actors do far better versions of similar protagonists in far more entertaining films (Pacino as Will Dormer in Insomnia, for example)

As someone who enjoyed the remake, I still feel compelled to point out the original Insomnia (1997, dir. Erik Skjoldbjærg) exceeds the American version in pretty much every single way. It's maybe the first movie I've seen which accurately transfers to its audience the sense of always snapping awake and never quite coming up to speed that comes with serious sleep deprivation; it is not an effect so much as an integral component of the film and it's awesome. It is also beautifully filmed, with an ambient electronic score that sounds like the loops your brain gets stuck in, working the same image over and over. And Stellan Skarsgård is one of my small gods of acting by now.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I actually interviewed Skjoldbjærg when Insomnia hit the TIFF that year; unfortunately, it went unused, since the film never got a Canadian release. So it's been a long while since I've seen the original, but from what I recally, I'm absolutely sure you're right...Skarsgard's amazing, in almost everything. Did you ever see The Killing Gene?

[sovay]

unfortunately, it went unused, since the film never got a Canadian release.

It's available from Criterion. If the price of DVDs ever drops as precipitously as the shift in audiovisual technology keeps promising, I'm picking up a copy.

Did you ever see The Killing Gene?

No; this is the same film as WΔZ? I'm not even sure it came out anywhere near me. Speak to me of it.

[phantom_wolfboy]

I haven't heard anything at all about the Unborn. Can you say a bit more about it?

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

In The Unborn, written and directed by David S. Goyer (probably best known for having co-written Batman Begins, but also the guy who wrote Blade, wrote/directed Blade: Trinity and created Blade: The Series), Odette Yustman's character becomes convinced that she's being haunted by the ghost of her twin brother, who died in the womb, after her left eye starts to change color from brown to blue. Further research reveals that the "ghost" is actually a dybbuk, a demon from Talmudic mythology which briefly entered the body of her great-uncle after he was killed during Mengele's twin experiments at Auschwitz. Recognizing that what had "come back" very definitely wasn't her brother, Yustman's grandmother killed him again, thus incurring the dybbuk's wrath; it's particularly attracted to Yustman's bloodline because twinship runs rampant in it, and mirrors are the easiest doorways through which a dybbuk can enter the fleshly universe ("...what is a twin but another sort of mirror?" Grandma remarks, in perhaps the film's best line).

[phantom_wolfboy]

Thank you! That does sound more interesting than the ads make it look.

[sovay]

a demon from Talmudic mythology which briefly entered the body of her great-uncle after he was killed during Mengele's twin experiments at Auschwitz.

Dybbuks are not actually demons; they are wandering dead spirits which possess the living. You can get demons from the other side of a mirror, though. See various stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer for details.

and mirrors are the easiest doorways through which a dybbuk can enter the fleshly universe ("...what is a twin but another sort of mirror?" Grandma remarks, in perhaps the film's best line).

Okay. That is a good line. And you cover all the mirrors in the house where a death has taken place.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Dybbuks are not actually demons; they are wandering dead spirits which possess the living.

I think they do in fact make that distinction, but Goyer also wants to talk about stuff from "before time started", so...perhaps he's implying that either this thing isn't a dybbuk so much as a thing that's been called a dybbuk under other circumstances, or that while it was alive once it's been dead for so long now that it doesn't behave like it was ever human anymore. Or WHATeva!