AN EPIDEMIC OF TREES
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| Some Kind Of Bliss AN EPIDEMIC OF TREES |
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Wednesday, October 30, 2002 Non sequitur
Watched them all between Thursday and Friday. Believe it or not, “Resident Evil” was the only decent film of the lot. Granted, “Tambien” had its moments and “Mulholland” was a slick, little package, but “Resident Evil” was the most pleasant surprise from the group. Maybe it was because it was a film based on a video game, and therefore the expectations weren't that high. Either way, "Manhunter" was incredibly overwrought and full of pregnant pauses large enough to birth septuplets in. "Tambien" was a visually impressive, but empty and predictable road movie/coming-of-age film. And "Mulholland" was further proof that David Lynch should not be given a movie camera until he can prove that he can tell a story from beginning to end. I don't mind vague or abstraction in my movies...I just want it to fit into some sort of narrative. Enticing the audience with a story and then tossing in random character changes and intermittent lesbian sex isn't good storytelling...it's a voyeuristic bait-and-switch that Lynch gives me in hopes of viewing his movie over and over again, proclaiming him some sort of genius when I'm too scared to 'fess up that I don't get it. To me, "Mulholland" was reading "1984" and having Winston, Julia and O'Brien all suddenly change places and drop in on the film "Bound." Yet, I enjoyed "Resident Evil" far more than I should. Despite a couple sloppy holes in the script (which was actually better if you read an early script draft written by the director), something about the film, I dunno, made me grin. Every year, I find one film that I like far more that I should, a film that normally I'd scoff, but instead I pick up and dust off the dirt and grime and admire for its spunk. I call these films my "Barabas" choices. You remember Barabas, right? From the Bible? Big guy, criminal. The bloke the crowd set free instead of Jesus. Actually, archeologists later learned that the crowd did in fact vote for Jesus, but they votes were distorted. Pilate heard them as Buchanan and let Barabas go anyway. Anyway, it all started in 1999 with the remake of "The Mummy," an unabashedly goofy adventure that doesn't stop to apologize for its cartoonishness. It's maybe the best tribune to "Raiders of the Lost Ark," another buffet of improbable characters and situations. "The Mummy" looked all dusty and grimy in a good way, didn't take itself too seriously and was the ideal cinematic mouthwash to larger, clunkier films out at the same time like "The Matrix" and "The Phantom Menace." Usually, I'd sneer at something like "The Mummy," but it was the cute little puppy you stare at and feel your heart melting. I couldn't kick it when it was down, and so "Barabas" movies were born. The Barabas winner for 2000 was the sci-fi actionner "Pitch Black" with Vin Diesel and 2001 was "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," maybe the most gorgeous piece of eye candy ever wrapped in a plot that didn't make a lick of sense. The invisible soul-sucking monsters were a great creepy touch, reminiscent, in some foreboding and unstoppable way, of Romero's zombies. I'm surprised I grabbed "Resident Evil" off the DVD shelf, to be honest. Zombies scare me. They frighten me, with their rotted ambling and single-minded lust for flesh. The zombies in Romero's "Dead" trilogy marked a quantum shift in movie monster-dom. Instead of a single monster existing to terrorize the hero, the sidekick and the damsel, a whole army of monsters would be on the march. Instead of the monster being some cursed soul (Dracula) or abomination (Frankenstein, black lagoon creature), the monster was your best friend minus a soul and definitely eager to feast on your tender, juicy organs. Or worse, you get bitten and infected, suffering the slow death behind the transformation. And then, despite all your donations to PETA, obeying every stop sign, and calling your mom on Mother's Day, you rise from the ground minus a few internal organs and begin feasting on your loved ones. And it's all done against your will, which is the part that gives me nightmares. It would be enough to be surrounded by flesh eaters, slowly and inescapable pinned down by tearing hands and gaping maws, ripped to pieces alive and feeling fingers picking at your stomach and intensities. I doubt if I would even scream as the warmth was snatched from my body. I would be happy to die, seeing as it couldn't get any worse. But in zombie lore, it can. It always does, and that's the pulse of the genre. From Romero films to fan fiction on the Web, just when you think humanity will survive, the dam breaks and the dead always get the upper hand. After all, when the zombies rise, it's only a matter of time. There's far more of them than there are of survivors, a mangy collective who never figures out the importance of working together. Infighting breaks out, the zombies break in and humanity loses one more refuge. One constant theme of the zombie genre is that humanity usually loses. The flesh is weak and damnation is forever. Zombies are the poor-man’s vampire, the low-rent Goth chic of decayed skin and mindless soullessness, mixed in with a little Judgment Day/end-of-the-world survivalist syrup to sweeten the trap. It’s the physical evidence the world has gone to hell, and it’s every man for himself. The masses are evil and you should save one bullet for yourself…just in case. By the way, if you thought the Romero zombie films are scary, just wait until "28 Days Later," a film by Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting") featuring a mix of zombies and a good old fashioned "end of the world" plague. All reports about the film call it the scariest work in ages, revamping the zombie genre to a whole new level. One critic (whose name escapes me) referred to the modern zombie monster as the "democratization of horror" (which is true in more than one way: In "Night of the Living Dead," the hero was a black man, a rarity among previous horror films). As referenced earlier, monsters use to be a single entity, maybe with henchmen. Here, there's no mastermind to defeat, there's no MacGuffin to be used to smite the zombies with a single button-push. There's no "Buffy the Zombie Slayer." Instead, it's you against the ravenous horde and you're going to make a mistake and be devoured by the masses. Taken one way, the zombies represent sacrilege and the taboo (the dead are devoid of their eternal rest and murder/cannibalism, respectively). Take it another way and it's an engaging metaphor about not selling out your beliefs when the crowd is swaying one way. It's easy to give in, to follow the group when the fight looks hopeless. After the news of Sen. Paul Wellstone's (D-MN) plan crash last week, I spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to fight for something you believe in. Last weekend, more than 100,000 people descended on Washington D.C. to protest possible U.S. military action on Iraq. In most cases, it was a blip on the news radar, eclipsed by a captured sniper and a fallen senator. Closed off in my home with my wife out of town on business, the thought of some of the biggest crowds since the Vietnam War protests gave me some hope. Yet, I wonder what's going to happen when the war starts? Will the anti-war crowd faded, as they did when the first Gulf War happened, and when the first reports coming from the front were insanely good ones for the U.S. America suffered an intoxicating fell-good wave, until we learned the news was Pentagon-fed. And that some soldiers were coming down with some mysterious syndrome. And about that time, after the war ended, the question was asked on bumper stickers across the nation, "Saddam Hussein still has a job, do you?" It was about then we figured we were suckered. Ten years later, the dim prince of a mediocre king is installed to finish a war that will only benefit the oil companies and CNN. Nothing anyone says (well, no one from a foreign country or a non-Republican) makes a difference. It's IraqIraqIraqIRAQ! I protest, I call my representatives. Tuesday, I'll vote. But frankly, I don't know what good it'll do. Sometimes I feel as if no one's listening. Wellstone listened. And now he's dead and gone. When my wife came home, I felt a relief come over me. A sense of normalcy was returning. She was here again, and it was then I knew what it was about Wellstone that I missed. Wellstone was always there. Wellstone never hesitated to take up the banner for the little guy or to take a stand against something that didn't gel with his conscience. Reports called him the last liberal in the Senate. A fitting, fighting epitaph. He took up the liberal moniker when liberal was a dirty word, when Clinton fought to find a moderate way (and ended up giving the GOP, in my humble opinion). Wellstone could be counted to speak for the veteran, the worker, the voter and dozens of other professions or titles that doesn't sound like banker, CEO or millionaire. And those 100,000 in D.C. knew what Wellstone was about. They figured out how to band together: Democrats, Greens, veterans, Independents, mom, dads, teachers, doctors, the hungry and the scared. There's hope in that mass who marched around the White House. I suppose I'm an optimist. I tried being a cynic, almost a nihilist and only got for my troubles the experience of losing more sleep and learning that I'm less fun to be around. When anyone thinks they're a nihilist, they think they're Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden. No, you're an obnoxious, selfish prat who read the Cliff's Notes of Nietzsche. No, instead, I'm the cocky American pilot as seen in Hollywood's romanticized vision of World War II Prisoner of War films...the one where the pilot grins that sly grin. I know that fence is there, but I know I'm getting out of here someday, somehow. It's just a matter of time. Sometimes I feel like I'm losing, something I think when I make a donation to Amnesty International I'm covering up or making up for the sins my country commits around the world in the name of "democracy" or national security interests. But one day, I know I'm going to figure a way around the maze and make a difference. posted by skobJohn | 5:58 PM | |
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