An Interstellar dog’s dinner

Minor spoiler warning because this is a discussion of Christopher Nolan’s new film Interstellar, if that kind of thing causes you angst. Nothing that wouldn’t be seen a mile off by any intelligent viewer of the trailer or the film itself, nor is there anything that wouldn’t be seen coming at interstellar distances (GET IT?) by any science fiction fan.

Thanks for all your help, sarcastic robot!

Interstellar is the story of three middle-aged white rappers who talk and gesticulate into a fish eye lens while a giant octopus monster fights a huge robot… no, wait… this is the plot of the video for Intergalactic.

The real Interstellar is a really well-crafted film with some beautiful imagery and design. Despite being an overlong and self-indulgent movie, the nearly three hour running time doesn’t feel like you’ve been wasting your life, despite parts of it seriously dragging on and outstaying their welcome. Certainly it’s better for a film like this– i.e. one that tries to be at least somewhat thoughtful and credits its audience with a little intelligence– to be hyped as the film of the moment than it is for utter shit like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or some ghost train jump scare horror movie to dominate the landscape. Apparently working out how to depict some of Interstellar‘s spacetime phenomena has directly helped the understanding of real astrophysics, and there can’t be many films or film makers who can say that.

The bad news:

Interstellar is actually about an intergalactic space mission via a wormhole, so its title is wrong for a start. Probably we have The Beastie Boys to blame for making it impossible that somebody as pathologically serious as Nolan could use it as a title for his film. On the evidence of his films to date, including Interstellar, he and his brother obviously also have major parental abandonment issues that they should work out with a therapist so they can move on with some new ideas in their scriptwriting. Like all of Nolan’s films it’s far too long and somebody ought to have the guts to make him lose at least 45 minutes from his running times. It’s ironic that Interstellar mentions relativistic time dilation so much, because each one of the scenes involving action or movement seemed to go on for longer than the entire three hours I was sitting in the auditorium, and not in a good way. He is not a great editor, or director of editors. Inception played to this weakness, or at least masked it, because time being stretched out was part of the plot. In general, though, action sequences shouldn’t make you want to look at a clock to see when they’re going to end.

Matt Damon in Interstellar: “They all think I’m crazy, but I know better. It is not I who are crazy. It is I who am MAD! Can’t you hear them? Didn’t you see the crowd?”

From the moment he appears on the screen, Matt Damon is obviously suffering from the SPACE MADNESS that countless good, bad and indifferent sci fi films have hammered to death as a plot device, not to mention it being a fixture of Star Trek, and every other sci fi show getting around to it eventually, as satirised perfectly in the eponymous Ren & Stimpy cartoon. No amount of Nolan solemnity can divert from the fact that this character is not very far away from floating around raving and eating soap like an animated chihuahua, especially with Chekhov’s manically disassembled robot (cf. The Black Hole) prominently featured just before Damon’s character appears. The carefully described relativistic physics and kitchen sink futurism of the first two thirds are unceremoniously airlocked in a ridiculously anthropocentric and cheesy final act because apparently love can break spacetime in your favour. A black hole is no biggie if you do a Peter Pan and simply believe enough, although Interstellar is still about 90% less saccharine than the similar Gravity. It’s not quite as logical or realistic as the All You Need is Love denouement of Yellow Submarine, though.

Michael Caine. Again. We get it, Chris, you want him to be your dad. Take it somewhere private.

The entire film could be compared to a pizza with lots of toppings; it’s clearly one item, quite a delicious one in fact, but it’s still basically junk food and all the pieces it’s made from are unavoidably obvious. To mention just a few: Transcendental space trips from 2001. Also HAL 9000 and the black Monolith from the same film, mashed up into a sardonic cuboid Jonathan Ives iRobot. On the subject of clunky, sardonic robots the most direct and therefore laughable comparison is again with Disney’s atrocious The Black Hole, but there’s also Moon, Wall-E, Forbidden Planet, K-9 from Doctor Who and even, shit, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Oh, hey, there’s the scene from Aliens where Ripley wakes up on a space station. There’s the space hangar from Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, et al. I wonder if somebody’s going to sneak in and steal one of the spacecraft because the hangar has inexplicably lax security? The barren inscrutability of alien planets from both radically different film versions of Solaris– somehow– plus a large dollop of the latter Soderbergh version’s 12 step-esque emphasis on transcendence through hitting rock bottom. There’s the romantically run down dustbowl near future farm house from Looper. Blatant self-plagiarisation of the gravity-shifting punch up, upside down buildings and nested timelines from Inception, though with greatly diminished returns.

There are even some large, distinct and undigested chunks of Farscape, although I doubt Nolan would ever admit to watching Farscape. He did use a Muppet as part of the main cast, though (Anne Hathaway). She urgently needs to learn more than two facial expressions, but she deserves some sympathy for having to deliver the mostly incredibly cheesy speech about love, in which both the love and the speech itself come from absolutely nowhere. It’s one of several sermons that bring the film to a screeching halt, but she does the best she can with it. Not last and not least– sardonic cuboid robots preserve us– there’s a last act story beat involving a deliberate plunge into a black hole, ripped whole from The Black Hole. At least there isn’t a wild west style shootout with laser guns.

It’s a tribute to Nolan’s strengths as a film maker that Interstellar is at least worth slightly more than the sum of its parts. It would just be nice if those parts were assimilated enough that it didn’t feel like a stumbling Frankenstein’s monster made of sci fi tropes and not the more philosophical, internal exploration it’s obviously aspiring to be. The same plot could have led to a wonderful, genuinely moving film under the directorship of somebody who approached it as magical realism instead of having the mentality of a kid playing with toy spaceships.

Into Stella.

Scarlett Johansson’s murder van

… and how she was punished for it.

It’s been out a while, but I only just got around to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, the enigmatic, glacial barely-horror film in which an alien (Scarlett Johansson) drives around in a white Transit van and preys upon lone men in Scotland. I’ve not read the novel by Michel Faber, upon which the film was based, so this discussion is purely about the latter. There’ll be spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the film and you’re one of those big babies there’s plenty of other things to read on this blog.

You know some bad news is coming, because I’ll start with the good. The film captures the bleak beauty and grey light of Scotland perfectly. It looks like the most grimly lush Radiohead video ever, if Radiohead singles were ever nearly two hours long. The score by Mica Levi puts many a mainstream horror soundtrack to shame with its angular, insectoid weirdness. Over the past year or so I’d say that only Cristabal Tapia De Veer’s peculiar score for Channel 4’s Utopia was better, more inventive or more crucial to the production’s atmosphere. Johansson seems to pick her acting roles at random out of a hat, and in the wrong film she can be stiff as a board and half as interesting. Given the chance, though, she can do great work. Making one of Sofia Coppola’s dreary chorus line of autobiographical Poor Little Rich Girl non-characters sympathetic (Lost in Translation) is quite an achievement, even when Bill Murray brings his full chemistry set. In Her, Spike Jonze and Joaquin Phoenix trowel on the protagonist’s lonely, nerdy life as a sadsack spod so thickly that we don’t doubt he’d take up all manner of hikikomori activities. It’s Johansson, however, whose voice performance really sells the concept of an incorporeal artificial intelligence product that loves and is lovable while at the same time never really anybody’s at all.

Conversely in Under the Skin, Johansson barely speaks through the whole film, but watch the extraordinary and chilling way her amoral, calculating character performs feminine charm and accommodation then a split second later looks like a dead cod lying on a bed of ice at the fishmonger’s. The only character comparison that immediately comes to mind is Daryl Hannah as Pris and Joanna Cassidy as Zhora in Blade Runner, inhuman humans who know exactly which male buttons to press but would snuff any man, woman or child without blinking. Hannah and Cassidy never got as much to do in Blade Runner as Johansson does here.

“The plot didn’t matter at all”

Rita Hayworth in ‘Gilda’ (1946).

Just some splendid stills from thrillers (mostly) of the 1940s and 1950s, reproduced from ‘Film Noir’ (Alain Silver, James Ursini, Paul Duncan: Taschen). I love Film Noir. ‘Gilda’ is one of the best and most noirish. Above is Rita Hayworth doing a passive-aggressive musical number/striptease in a club to get back at her boyfriend and her ex-boyfriend for their machinations with each other and with her. As you do.

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in ‘Double Indemnity’ (1944).

Nazo, Emperor of the Universe

See the first post about Japanese kamishibai (paper theatre) in the 1930s and the previous post about WWII kamishibai for more information and commentary about the origins and context of these images.

A postwar ‘Golden Bat’ serial. Nazo, the Emperor of the Universe, is apparently an overweight heterochromial cat with a black bag over his head. Sort of like a cross between David Bowie, the Baader Meinhof gang, and Bagpuss. Actually this sounds fabulous, but who knew? The expression of Nazo’s captive says it all: OH REALLY?

‘Mystery Train’, late 1940s or early 1950s. Mystery Train? I’ll say. Why did somebody in a man-sized glove costume just get on? Quick, put your bag down so he doesn’t sit next to you.

Banzai?

See the first post about Japanese kamishibai (paper theatre) for more information and commentary about the origins and context of these images.

Here we move into the 1940s, WWII and the dodgy, overly-positive world of propaganda. Propaganda is almost by definition absurd and deceptive; if it wasn’t so cognitively dissonant and detached from observed reality then we’d just call it informative or documentarian. But there’s still something particularly disturbing about the hijacking of a medium intended mainly for children. The slides shown here are from How to Build a Home Air Raid Shelter and from Kintaro the Paratrooper. The latter is a militaristic rewrite of the traditional story about Momotoro the Peach Boy, who joined up with animal friends to defend Japan from invading demons. You can see what they did there, obviously.

Kintaro the Paratrooper. Here come the British soldiers. Their tank seems a bit wee, but perhaps that’s intentional. I’m British but I still can’t really object to this racist caricature of us with our stupid shorts and our sunburned ears and noses. Stereotypes all have an original.

Kintaro throws a grenade at the British tank. Kawaiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.

Cry of the Andes

Cry of the Andes, episode 1. 1930s.

This is the first of several posts about Japanese kamishibai (paper theatre), a popular form of storytelling that began in the 1930s, peaked in the post-war/American occupation period, and more or less died out with the rise of Japan as a modern, technologically developed country. The material is all from Eric P. Nash’s great book Manga Kamishibai. As usual, out of respect for the author and the publisher (and also to piss off the imbeciles who are always going on about printed books being dead trees and obsolete, everything’s online now, blah blah blah) I’ll hopefully be posting just enough to arouse your interest without coming anywhere close to making it pointless to buy or borrow the book.

Kamishibaiya (paper theatre storytellers) would roll up to a street corner on their bicycles, which also supported a butai– a miniature wooden theatre into which the illustrated boards for the stories could be slid in and out. These boards were about 14 inches by 10. Until WWII each story set and board were unique because they were inked and coloured by hand using watercolour and opaque tempera paints, then lacquered and waxed to protect them from the weather. The boards provided a low-tech form of slideshow animation, but of course what really brought the stories to life were the storytellers. At one point kamishibai was such a cultural touchstone that when television was introduced to Japan in 1953, it was sometimes referred to as denki kamishibai: electric paper theatre.

The examples shown here are from a 1930s series called Cry of the Andes. It’s a sort-of Western adventure, though obviously set in Peru and filtered through the distinctly Eastern perspective of a nation that had never seen (or been) cowboys.

Next time: paper theatre for children takes a weird and sinister turn during WWII. Cute boar soldiers bayonetting captives for the Emperor, and so forth.

Cry of the Andes, episode 3. In true Japanese style they decided to jazz the boring old Western up a bit by giving the villain a crazy mask, a swirling cloak and a random bat symbol on his forehead.

Kuchisake Onna

Japan panic: the slit-mouthed woman

Kuchisake onna goes kawaii: Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. Is she pretty?

Stories of 口裂け女, the slit-mouthed woman, emerged from urban Japan in the late 1970s. At first they were particularly passed around between school children, then in the mass media. By the first half of 1979 Asahi Shinbun was highlighting kuchisake onna as a buzzword (hayari kotoba) of the year. In true, random Japanese style one of the others was “rabbit hutches”.

Occasionally Kuchisake onna was reported as a genuine physical threat, a criminal would-be kidnapper or murderer rather than a supernatural being. At times she was somehow both a real world abductor and a folkloric monster simultaneously. (See Hyaku-monogatari for the Edo origins of modern yōkai storytelling) Satoshi Kon’s extremely uneven but in places brilliant series 妄想代理人 Mōsō Dairinin [Paranoia Agent] is obviously heavily inspired by the mass hysteria over Kuchisake onna. A woman with long hair and a white mask– of the kind sold everywhere and very common in Japan to cover the mouth and nose when a person is ill, or against pollution– accosts you in the street and she asks something like “Watashi kirei?” (“Am I pretty?”) or “Atashi bijin ka?” (“Am I a beauty?”) If you agree that she is, she replies “Kore demo?” (“Even [like] this?”) as she tears off her mask to show that her mouth is slit open across the cheeks, from ear to ear. If you tell her she isn’t pretty, she becomes enraged and pursues you with a knife or scythe. The reason for her disfigurement and rage varies with the telling: sometimes it’s a plastic surgery disaster, sometimes a dreadful accident, sometimes self-inflicted. The same goes for the means of escaping her: repeating certain words, offering certain gifts, reaching a certain place before she catches you.

Hyaku-monogatari

Edo horror stories

The hyaku-monogatari (“one hundred stories”) were told in Edo-era Japan when people came together to exchange kaidan, stories of ghosts, monsters, mysterious (fushigi) happenings, and frightening (osoroshiki) characters. This gatherings, hyaku-monogatari kaidan kai, can be conceived of as a kind of market for exchanging stories. These might be real (or claimed) personal experiences, stories people knew from elsewhere, or a story of their own devising. There may not always have been exactly one hundred stories; as in English, saying there are “a hundred” or “hundreds” of something can be deliberate hyperbole, just a way of saying there are more than you can easily count. Stories of mysterious and frightening things (mononoke) were and are indeed endless in number.

Kami-kiri (“Hair-cutter”) yōkai from ‘Hyakkai Zukan’ by Sawaki Suushi, 1737.

Wakan kaidan hyōrin, 1718:

“First light one hundred wicks with blue paper around them, and hide all weapons. Now, for each frightening tale, extinguish one wick… when all one hundred flames have been extinguished, a monster (bakemono) will most definitely appear.”

Hide all weapons! The theatricality of the slowly gathering darkness as the tellers vie with each other to tell the scariest story speaks for itself, I think.  The ritualistic repetition also plays a part in creating an immersive experience in which we allow ourselves to be scared. Try it! In fact I already used the techniques of the hyaku-monogatari kaidan kai directly in my own live show about occult stories and supernatural folk beliefs in Tudor England, Magickal Realism.

The popularity of the (by definition ephemeral and oral) hyaku-monogatari also contributed to a publishing boom as the best stories began to be collected and made available in print, making an enthusiasm for monsters and supernatural beings (妖怪 yōkai) the national Japanese pastime that it remains today. As for the yōkai themselves, it’s a huge subject with no shortage of English-language resources available online.

Source: Pandemonium and Parade– Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai by Michael Dylan Foster.

PS Semi-related, daft and entertaining, Denki Groove– モノノケダンス (Mononoke Dance):

Poetic squashing

Nearly 2400 years have passed since Aristotle perfectly summed up good and bad writing in The Poetics, and yet still we get narrative disasters like (for example) Prometheus. Aristotle obviously didn’t know Hollywood existed and yet he describes it perfectly in the first paragraph quoted below. He even tells us how to do “villain crushed by a huge object” correctly…

“Of simple plots and actions those that are episodic are the worst. By an episodic plot I mean one in which the sequence of the episodes is neither probable nor necessary. Plays of this kind are written by bad poets because they cannot help it, and by good poets because of the actors; writing for the dramatic competitions, they often strain a plot beyond  the bounds of possibility, and are thus obliged to dislocate the continuity of events.

However, tragedy is the representation not only of a complete action, but also of incidents that waken fear and pity, and effects of this kind are more heightened when things happen unexpectedly as well as logically, for then they will be more remarkable than if they seem merely mechanical or accidental. Indeed, even chance occurrences seem most remarkable when they have the appearance of having been brought about by design– when, for example, the statue of Mitys at Argos killed the man who had caused Mitys’s death, by falling down on him at a public entertainment. Things like this do not even seem mere chance occurrences. Thus plots of this type are necessarily better than others.”

I wasn’t able to find out who Mitys was or why he had a statue big enough to kill somebody; it seems he’s only remembered to history via this reference by Aristotle, as the chap whose statue killed the man who killed him.

Edward Gorey: “After it had passed, Lord Wherewithal was found crushed beneath a statue blown down from the parapet.” from ‘The Secrets: Volume One, The Other Statue,’ 1968.

Beautiful Spam VI: Jesus’ lovely name

Dear friends in Christ, greetings in Jesus’ lovely name. I recently received a revelatory message from Nigeria, directly to my inbox, unfiltered and unhampered by the array of anti-spam measures that usually insulate me from friends in Crap like “Pastor” John Izejoko of Benin. He does not want money, oh no; he wants Bibles.

“Dear friend in Christ,
Greetings in Jesus lovely name. I read about you online in your web and thank God for meeting you and knowing about you. I pray my message finds you doing well in Christ. I also want you to note that all I’m asking for from you is neither silver nor gold but God’s holy book. Meeting one through the internet especially now that all evil abounds in it can be very distrusting but mine is all about God and outside of it nothing.”

Jesus’ name is lovely, isn’t it? I think the loveliness of his name is probably the main reason that people who like Jesus like Jesus as much as they do. If John really read about me “in my web”, I don’t think he’d be talking about Bibles to me. Hello, John, I’m an atheist and I recently did a video for a black metal band. So I’m not really doing well in Christ, whatever that means. Sounds a bit unpleasant, to be honest. He’s right, though, that all evil abounds in the internet. Facebook, Pinterest, etc. Those are proper evil, aren’t they?