Thursday Already?

[handful_ofdust]

Amazing how time flies. At any rate:

My last two films--rented--were Rodriguez's Machete and Case 39, directed by Christian Alvart, the same guy responsible for Antibodies and Pandorum. The former is just as crazy as you expect--I admire it for its completely committed 'sploitation attitude, which allows Eva Mendes to appear utterly buck-ass naked within the first ten minutes and not look ridiculous, even when she's pulling a cellphone out of (one assumes) her chocha. See also: Danny Trejo having offscreen sex with both Michelle Rodriguez and Jessica Alba, who's as un-whitebread here as I've ever seen her. But although it's extremely enjoyable while you're in it it still goes by pretty damn fast, leaving no aftertaste whatsoever behind.

Case 39, OTOH, is a bit of a puzzler. All the performances are surprisingly good, but the film itself has a distinct MoTW aura--maybe the cinematography, pacing, music, or all three? Shot on location in Vancouver, with Jodelle Ferland playing main CanCon duty and Callum Keith Rennie for back-up. It starts out with Renee Zellwegger "rescuing" Ferland from her parents, who seem to be murderously, hyper-religiously insane; they believe Ferland's irredeemably evil, waiting until she's asleep to stuff her in the oven and turn it on high. Zellwegger then petitions the court to let her quasi-adopt Ferland, who she's fallen in maternal love with. Quickly, however, she finds out that the parents may have had a point...

Ferland, as ever, is superb--and so is Zellwegger, though her turnaround seems monumentally abrupt. It's interesting to note that the narrative works just as well (if not better) when you assume that instead of a "demon" in human form, Ferland might "just" be a telepath who's instinctually learned to manipulate the fears of people around her; even her own infernal self-image may be the direct result of cherry-picking her very Roman Catholic parents' brains. But though the film contains many truly disturbing moments, the denouement is vaguely unsatisfying. It needs...space to breathe, more room, a more novelistic approach. Can a person like this be re-trained to heal rather than harm? Does she actually want love? Is this what Professor X would be like, if he hadn't had the right sort of parents? The film doesn't know, or care.

One way or the other, it all stinks of studio interference. I'm not surprised Alvart went back to Austria, especially after the one-two punch of this vs. Pandorum's all-but-burial.

Okay, so: Today I need to take all the rethinking I did yesterday re "Lagan", make those notes, and try o break back into the story proper--plus input the notes for Chapter One of A Tree of Bones, etc. And wait for my rewrite template...

Comments

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I've been a fan of Jodelle Ferland since Silent Hill. Do they subvert anything in Case 39? I mean, is your reading supported by the text (haha)?

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I think it is. It's specifically stated that she controls other people's behaviour by threatening to show them their greatest fears, and she certainly kills a couple of people by giving them hallucinations of those fears. The minute Renee Zellwegger is able to talk herself through hers--to tell herself that they're not real--Jodelle no longer has any power over her, and is reduced once more to just being a ten-year-old with a ten-year-old's relative strength, helpless in front of an angry adult. The fact that she can initiate a hallucinatory state over the phone just means she maybe can implant post-hypnotic suggestions, which would still be in keeping with my telepath theory--she does the bulk of the work when she's close up to you, then sets it in motion from far away.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Oh, also: At one point she says she could always tell what her parents were thinking. And Rennie says the only time to approach her is when she's asleep, because otherwise she'll be able to beat you off. There's an instance where it looks like she rips a bunch of locks off Zellwegger's door and opens it via telekinesis or something, but by then I didn't trust anything played from Zellwegger's POV.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I kind of like the idea of this kind of story (child turns out to be evil!) told from the POV of an unreliable adult, but that's probably been done. I think I'm still mad that the exorcist in The Last Exorcism didn't turn out to be evil/crazy himself.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Considering he began as a hypocrite ( even a well-intentioned one), I think I would have been annoyed by Cotton turning out to be evil. How-eva, I do think there was an interesting, unaddressed theme inherent in his background as a child exorcist, which is really only the reverse-image of a child possessee. If his re-conversion/renewed faith meant that he reverted to his mental state during those years, and we went further with the idea of Nell's "demon" being a dybbuk-like single-form MPD which allowed her to speak out against the abuse she was suffering, now that might have been a neat-o Clash of Madnesses!

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, I would've settled for turning out to be possessed. I'm just sad that the surplus of exorcism stories turn out so similarly (although maybe The Rite will be different, who knows - the trailer looks creepy). I agree on your last sentence, though. It's a shame they (literally) pulled away at that moment. In related news, I finished A Good and Happy Child - I liked it (especially his last chapter as a child), and need to write a post about it.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I'd be very interested in hearing a post from you about it!

Maybe the problem with telling exorcism stories these days lies in the fact that while everyone's afraid of possession as a concept (because it echoes mental illness, but without even the possibility of diagnosis and cure), no one wants to say straight out: Oh yeah, that's what it was--a ghost, a demon, Satan, God. Because that way lies being known as a proselytizing Fundie, so instead you get an awful lot of hmmm, ha, not actually sure WHAT that is/was. Maybe that guy was just crazy! Yeah, that's the ticket! Which is why stories like Noroi are so appealing, at least to me--they come from cultures A) you don't know the basics of (unless it is your culture) and B) where stuff like this isn't instantly debunked, either.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Oh my God, and that reminds me--I forgot all about another film I saw over the holidays, a Muslim horror movie from Turkey called Born of Fire which seems to be in part about possession by djinn. Have to wait 'til tomorrow for more on that one, though, I think.;)

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

That was certainly an issue in A Good And Happy Child. But don't you think that The Exorcist (and its sequels/prequels) and The Exorcism of Emily Rose come down pretty firmly on the side of "it's a demon"? The Last Exorcism is definitely "or maybe it is you who are the crazy." Or are you also including exorcism in books (which I don't know much about). Yeah, I think part of what makes Noroi work so well is that it's taking place in a culture where there are TV shows looking for child psychics and communal rituals still take places in the back woods.

I don't know if you watch Destination Truth, but I like it for similar reasons. There's one episode where they go to investigate ghosts at a Buddhist cemetery in Thailand, and their translator dude has already told them the signs that ghosts are around = the smell of corpses, and dogs barking (I've heard the dogs barking one myself, in Indonesia). So they're sitting there in the dark waiting for ghosts in the cemetery, and hear dogs barking and smell something bad, and soon the translator is gone. High-tailed it out of there. They find him the next day and he's like "yeah, F the shit you're doing."

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but you see...The Exorcist gets away with it actually being a demon because it's a classic made by an atheist Jew and a very overt Roman Catholic, so people assume their fairly combative partnership negates any lingering taste of crazy. And Emily Rose really IS a proselytization vehicle--it was made by a devout Baptist to A) take advantage of the Fundie market and B) possibly convert some horror-loving heathen along the way. The movies being made these days are, as far as I know, mainly being made by atheists/agnostics trying to play to either a wide PG-rated market or a committed horror audience, most of whom they (probably correctly) assume are also atheists/agnostics, or even aggressive and proselytizing atheists/agnostics. It's the same divide my husband Steve keeps running into in the SFF market--people who worship Lewis and Tolkien's product, but think the faith that prompted it is egregious, toxic BS. (I've even gotten it from horror "fans" who can't stand Arthur Machen or M.R. James, because they're a bit too deludedly Xtian for their purposes.)

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Huh. I have to admit I am unaware of all of that (although I could sort of tell that Emily Rose was a proselytization vehicle anyway), but there is definitely tension in Western SFF/H between Christianity and atheism, particularly since so many conservatives in the genre seem to be non-religious libertarians.

I guess from my agnostic/who-the-fuck-knows perspective, "religious horror movies" - or even "ghost" movies with Christian influences, like Amityville - have always seemed fairly, well, Christian. It doesn't bother me mostly (Emily Rose started to grate, however) because they revolve more around hell and evil than they do around the light - and personally, I am more convinced of the existence of the dark than the light, for various reasons that I think Téa Obreht touched on well in "Twilight of the Vampires" - that in highly superstitious developing countries, the light is just a ward against the dark.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

That Destination Truth ep. sounds amazing! Is it available on Youtube?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Gnu7cLXbo

It is amazing, I promise you. I watched it by myself and I must admit it freaked me out (because it was so close to the kinds of things, culturally, that scared me as a kid).

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Wow, that host guy's pretty much of a massive douche, isn't he? I'd've enjoyed it a long more if he hadn't been in the foreground all the time.;)

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Ahaha I actually like Josh. This is so rare (that I like something/someone and you don't).

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Well, he's certainly physically attractive. I just don't love his complete lack of any real research or respect, let alone the way he was constantly ragging on the translator for being a "scaredy-cat".

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yep, he's basically a dumb American tourist. The kind who would be killed in a movie like Hostel or Turistas.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I recall you mentioning before that a lot of people decided to hate Signs because the main character’s faith was validated (or at least not *invalidated*) at the end – but as a fictional character, the guy actually does have a creator, in the form of the screenwriter – at the most basic level, what happens is that he realizes: “Oh hey, someone hung a loaded gun on the wall in the first act, didn’t they? I can use it to fight off my attackers. Thanks, whoever did that.”

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I’ve always liked the ambiguity of the one scene in The Ring in which we hear Samara speak, the video of her interview in the psychiatric hospital:

(Voice of doctor): Now then, you don’t want to hurt people, do you?

Samara (quietly): But I do.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I always loved how that FB clip is played twice, slightly different each time. In the first, she seems slightly sad and sorry about it. In the second, she absolutely isn't.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I missed that. Given her effect on tapes, do you think the actual recorded image changed over time as she became more bitter?

[sovay]

It's interesting to note that the narrative works just as well (if not better) when you assume that instead of a "demon" in human form, Ferland might "just" be a telepath who's instinctually learned to manipulate the fears of people around her; even her own infernal self-image may be the direct result of cherry-picking her very Roman Catholic parents' brains.

And that sounds like someone Judy Kiss would run into. Or possibly Mac.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

It does, doesn't it?;) I'm beginning to rack up a bunch of "Judy Kiss: Reluctant Psychic Eye/Debunker" short story ideas...

[sovay]

I'm beginning to rack up a bunch of "Judy Kiss: Reluctant Psychic Eye/Debunker" short story ideas...

Collection!