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Sep. 7th, 2012 09:45 amThe bus driver came on time today! Quite the turn-around, considering that on Wednesday she was 35+ minutes late, arriving at 9:10 AM. When I told Mom, she asked: "When does school start?" "9:00 AM." "That's not good." "Well, no."
But here we go--progress. Fingers crossed as to the rest of the school year.
Took me all day yesterday, but I also managed to drive myself through my piece on Pupi Avati. Naturally, this means A) that I'm now exhausted--I don't know why, but I've been waking each morning in ever-more-contortionate positions, so much so that this morning I found my arm had gone numb from being folded behind me at a fairly sharp angle--and B) that I need to spend this entry talking about Yellowbrickroad (aka YellowBrickRoad, I've seen both spellings), as promised. Due to my current state, it may be a bit more bullet-pointy than I'd originally intended, for which I apologize in advance.
Co-written and -directed by Andy Mitton and Jess Holland (it's their mutual first feature), the film starts with an evocative, slightly Blair Waitch-esque premise: The idea that back in 1940, the entire population of a small New Hampshire town called Friar suddenly got up and walked away into the woods, following a trail they renamed "YellowBrickRoad" with a crude, hand-lettered sign. 300 bodies were later found by a military investigation, some burned and some frozen, many slaughtered; the rest of the town's populace were never found at all. In the Friar movie theatre, a copy of The Wizard of Oz was discovered that had been watched so many times that the film had fused together. The sole survivor, when interviewed, claimed he could still hear a mysterious noise telling him to resume his journey. "Can't you hear it?" He pleads, on a taped record.
(And here's where I'm going to spend a moment being unduly nit-picky about historical accuracy: Though the pre-credits prologue setting all this up is intriguing, it's put together in such a way as to suggest the 1970s rather than the 1940s: What looks like Super-8 or -16 footage take on-site, very little physical documentation, the interview tape...given it would, indeed, have to have been a military investigation, I'd have been very interested to see use of redaction, as well as more still photos, perhaps a sanitized version of the story put together as a newsreel intercut with random splices of uncensored footage, overlaid at points by radio coverage. But since it's three minutes out of two hours, maybe that's neither here nor there.)
Okay, so: Our core cast consists of documentarian Teddy Barnes (Michael Laurino), his wife Melissa (Anessa Ramsey) and their BFF Walter Myrick (Alex Draper), a psychiatrist/teacher who seems to be in simultaneous platonic love with both of them. For the expedition Teddy wants to take--ie, tracing the trail from Friar while filming the experience--they also pick up two surveyor siblings (one played by co-producer Cassidy Freeman, who used to be Tess on Smallville), an intern, a forest ranger and a local girl they meet at the movie theatre now standing where GPS says "the trailhead" should be. This chick, Liv (the excellent Laura Heisler, who needs to get more work out of her performance here), claims that her grandfather made the hike from Friar, but survived; this later turns out to be a line, offered to get her a place on the roster.
"But everybody around here knows why they did it," she later tells Teddy. "And everybody around here wants to do it, too. Because you want to think there's something there, something else, like it's waiting for you...like it knows you. And the worst part is...it does."
So off our explorers go, blithely, into the woods. Mitton and Holland make the interesting choice to play the bulk of the film in full sunlight rather than having stuff happen at night, accelerating the disconnect between serene natural beauty and the weird shit that starts to happen fairly quickly. GPS problems continue, with their instruments constantly telling them they're in Guam or just outside Melbourne; the surveyors take and re-take their measurements, but it's fairly obvious that what the male half of the team is entering in his notebook may well be gibberish, especially after he finds an old-timey hat seeming to date from the Friar exodus in the trees and refuses to take it off. Then 1940s-style music starts playing far off, warped, as though through a gramophone. It stops and starts randomly, increasing in volume until it's painful, then cutting off in mid-note. The psychological checks Walter delivers every day get progressively more bizarre. Etc.
And then...things come to a sudden head when, during the course of one more throw-down over the hat, the male surveyor attacks and literally dismembers his sister. Mitton and Holland choose to play this mainly at a distance, from the rest of the group's initially-distracted POV, against a backdrop of Oz-like happy singing. After the blood and dust have settled, they're forced to take the brother prisoner, which he cooperates with--he seems horror-struck by his own actions, unable to understand why things escalated. There's some debate about going back, spear-headed by the ranger, but Teddy's forced to admit that without a working GPS, it's impossible to figure out which way to go. Not to mention that he, and therefore Melissa, is determined to keep on moving forwards, to prove that there must be something he can salvage from the mistakes they've made thus far...
I'm not going to go into how thinks break down from there, although they most definitely do. The cast make their descent into madness and violence fascinating to watch--they split into groups, split up, getting further and further lost. One reverts to childhood, resuming what seems to be a schoolyard bully-magnet victim posture. The spectre of suicide seems to prompt two characters to use poisonous berries as hallucinogens, prompting a rambling, babbling woodland trip. Betrayals abound. The music increases and deforms until it's hitting them like sonic canon-fire, forcing them to stuff their ears with cotton. And then, at last, there's that massive deadfall they reach with the sister's mutilated corpse strung up in front of it like a scarecrow, beyond which the road seems to stretch on forever--
It's a mystery, localized in intent but cosmic in scope, a place where the established rules of time, space and physics seem suspended. And the problem with all mysteries, particularly walkabout-inspired ones, is that while they hint and tease at some grand climactic revelation of massive spiritual import, what you eventually find at the road's end can never live up to whateer you've already conjured in the back of your mind. Which is why I agree with many critics I've read that the film might work better if it ended sooner, and less neatly; while I realize that resonance is hard to discard, especially when you've named your whole movie after an L. Frank Baum reference, sometimes it's better to just simply let all that go. To stay with the quiet voice suddenly speaking from the depths of the cave right behind you, telling you what's about to happen next, with all the dreadful finality of the oracle at Delphi...
"Does it have to hurt so much?"
"Yes. It really, really does."
Alas, how terrible is wisdom
when it brings no profit to the man that's wise!
This I knew well, but had forgotten it,
else I would not have come here.
Overall, taking its flaws into account, I enjoyed Yellowbrickroad a bunch--not just because I prize ambition, but because its enigmatic nature seems intentional, rather than a biproduct of writing yourself into a budgetary corner. It reminded me strongly in many places of the work of Jeff Vandermeer, which he may or may not find flattering as a comparison; things seem random, but perhaps are part of a far larger design, equally knit from hubris and and human frailty in the face of nature's overpowering essential unknowability. And Laird Barron, too, as livia_llewellyn pointed out in comments yesterday--though if Laird had written it, that cave would've probably been the final shot. The eternally-gaping open maw of Father Worm.
There: Done. Back to "Scarlet Town".
But here we go--progress. Fingers crossed as to the rest of the school year.
Took me all day yesterday, but I also managed to drive myself through my piece on Pupi Avati. Naturally, this means A) that I'm now exhausted--I don't know why, but I've been waking each morning in ever-more-contortionate positions, so much so that this morning I found my arm had gone numb from being folded behind me at a fairly sharp angle--and B) that I need to spend this entry talking about Yellowbrickroad (aka YellowBrickRoad, I've seen both spellings), as promised. Due to my current state, it may be a bit more bullet-pointy than I'd originally intended, for which I apologize in advance.
Co-written and -directed by Andy Mitton and Jess Holland (it's their mutual first feature), the film starts with an evocative, slightly Blair Waitch-esque premise: The idea that back in 1940, the entire population of a small New Hampshire town called Friar suddenly got up and walked away into the woods, following a trail they renamed "YellowBrickRoad" with a crude, hand-lettered sign. 300 bodies were later found by a military investigation, some burned and some frozen, many slaughtered; the rest of the town's populace were never found at all. In the Friar movie theatre, a copy of The Wizard of Oz was discovered that had been watched so many times that the film had fused together. The sole survivor, when interviewed, claimed he could still hear a mysterious noise telling him to resume his journey. "Can't you hear it?" He pleads, on a taped record.
(And here's where I'm going to spend a moment being unduly nit-picky about historical accuracy: Though the pre-credits prologue setting all this up is intriguing, it's put together in such a way as to suggest the 1970s rather than the 1940s: What looks like Super-8 or -16 footage take on-site, very little physical documentation, the interview tape...given it would, indeed, have to have been a military investigation, I'd have been very interested to see use of redaction, as well as more still photos, perhaps a sanitized version of the story put together as a newsreel intercut with random splices of uncensored footage, overlaid at points by radio coverage. But since it's three minutes out of two hours, maybe that's neither here nor there.)
Okay, so: Our core cast consists of documentarian Teddy Barnes (Michael Laurino), his wife Melissa (Anessa Ramsey) and their BFF Walter Myrick (Alex Draper), a psychiatrist/teacher who seems to be in simultaneous platonic love with both of them. For the expedition Teddy wants to take--ie, tracing the trail from Friar while filming the experience--they also pick up two surveyor siblings (one played by co-producer Cassidy Freeman, who used to be Tess on Smallville), an intern, a forest ranger and a local girl they meet at the movie theatre now standing where GPS says "the trailhead" should be. This chick, Liv (the excellent Laura Heisler, who needs to get more work out of her performance here), claims that her grandfather made the hike from Friar, but survived; this later turns out to be a line, offered to get her a place on the roster.
"But everybody around here knows why they did it," she later tells Teddy. "And everybody around here wants to do it, too. Because you want to think there's something there, something else, like it's waiting for you...like it knows you. And the worst part is...it does."
So off our explorers go, blithely, into the woods. Mitton and Holland make the interesting choice to play the bulk of the film in full sunlight rather than having stuff happen at night, accelerating the disconnect between serene natural beauty and the weird shit that starts to happen fairly quickly. GPS problems continue, with their instruments constantly telling them they're in Guam or just outside Melbourne; the surveyors take and re-take their measurements, but it's fairly obvious that what the male half of the team is entering in his notebook may well be gibberish, especially after he finds an old-timey hat seeming to date from the Friar exodus in the trees and refuses to take it off. Then 1940s-style music starts playing far off, warped, as though through a gramophone. It stops and starts randomly, increasing in volume until it's painful, then cutting off in mid-note. The psychological checks Walter delivers every day get progressively more bizarre. Etc.
And then...things come to a sudden head when, during the course of one more throw-down over the hat, the male surveyor attacks and literally dismembers his sister. Mitton and Holland choose to play this mainly at a distance, from the rest of the group's initially-distracted POV, against a backdrop of Oz-like happy singing. After the blood and dust have settled, they're forced to take the brother prisoner, which he cooperates with--he seems horror-struck by his own actions, unable to understand why things escalated. There's some debate about going back, spear-headed by the ranger, but Teddy's forced to admit that without a working GPS, it's impossible to figure out which way to go. Not to mention that he, and therefore Melissa, is determined to keep on moving forwards, to prove that there must be something he can salvage from the mistakes they've made thus far...
I'm not going to go into how thinks break down from there, although they most definitely do. The cast make their descent into madness and violence fascinating to watch--they split into groups, split up, getting further and further lost. One reverts to childhood, resuming what seems to be a schoolyard bully-magnet victim posture. The spectre of suicide seems to prompt two characters to use poisonous berries as hallucinogens, prompting a rambling, babbling woodland trip. Betrayals abound. The music increases and deforms until it's hitting them like sonic canon-fire, forcing them to stuff their ears with cotton. And then, at last, there's that massive deadfall they reach with the sister's mutilated corpse strung up in front of it like a scarecrow, beyond which the road seems to stretch on forever--
It's a mystery, localized in intent but cosmic in scope, a place where the established rules of time, space and physics seem suspended. And the problem with all mysteries, particularly walkabout-inspired ones, is that while they hint and tease at some grand climactic revelation of massive spiritual import, what you eventually find at the road's end can never live up to whateer you've already conjured in the back of your mind. Which is why I agree with many critics I've read that the film might work better if it ended sooner, and less neatly; while I realize that resonance is hard to discard, especially when you've named your whole movie after an L. Frank Baum reference, sometimes it's better to just simply let all that go. To stay with the quiet voice suddenly speaking from the depths of the cave right behind you, telling you what's about to happen next, with all the dreadful finality of the oracle at Delphi...
"Does it have to hurt so much?"
"Yes. It really, really does."
Alas, how terrible is wisdom
when it brings no profit to the man that's wise!
This I knew well, but had forgotten it,
else I would not have come here.
Overall, taking its flaws into account, I enjoyed Yellowbrickroad a bunch--not just because I prize ambition, but because its enigmatic nature seems intentional, rather than a biproduct of writing yourself into a budgetary corner. It reminded me strongly in many places of the work of Jeff Vandermeer, which he may or may not find flattering as a comparison; things seem random, but perhaps are part of a far larger design, equally knit from hubris and and human frailty in the face of nature's overpowering essential unknowability. And Laird Barron, too, as livia_llewellyn pointed out in comments yesterday--though if Laird had written it, that cave would've probably been the final shot. The eternally-gaping open maw of Father Worm.
There: Done. Back to "Scarlet Town".
