Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (33 page)

Since there were no opening credits, I kept asking myself, “Who’s the broad with Susan Sarandon’s eyes in the dark hair playing the Witch/Queen?” The credits come on and it is, of course, Susan Sarandon. (Even the dragon later on has her eyes.) Disney’s back—and they almost got it right.

 

By far, the most influential movie of the year was
The Host
, a Korean monster movie. It’s like
Them!
told from the p.o.v. of the Lodge boys, the ones who end up in the storm drains after the giant ants have pulled their father’s arm off while they were down by the river flying a model airplane. You’re having fun and then giant ants are everywhere.

The Host
is about a family who runs a squid shop on the river in Seoul—suddenly there’s a monster there, and the daughter’s taken away. They try to find her for the rest of the movie. They aren’t part of the military or members of an investigative team (the
Them!
and other 1950s templates). The scenes of the monster’s first appearance are truly frightening. People stand around watching something BIG in the distance coming toward them. Nothing should be that big. Nothing that big should be on a riverbank in Seoul—and then it’s on them.

As I’ve said elsewhere, a few Koreans have some things to teach Hollywood.

It has had its greatest influence on
Cloverfield
, which is a 2008 movie. Trust me.

Don’t get me started.

 

The Golden Compass
(or, “Bears Discover Armor”) is set in a world that is not our own, like some Edwardian para-time ruled by the quasi-religious Magisterium. In this world, all the children have changeable daemons (familiars), but by the time they reach adulthood, their daemons have settled on a permanent form. (The daemon of Sam Elliott is, of course, a jackrabbit, which is perfect.) There’s some sinister goings-on in a sort of Oompa-Loompa domain run by the Magisterium near the North Pole (sort of a Ray Eames Santa Claus house) involving children’s daemons and evil designs. There are armored bears, some terrific fights, quests, and kids learning lessons. People who’ve read the books tell me it ends halfway through the first one.

 

The acting in
The Mist
(from the King novella) is better than the script; people filling out sketchily written characters with good old-fashioned craftsmanship. And I knew, once the protag started counting the bullets, we were in for a hopeful downer of an ending. There is some attempt to show the ecology of wherever-it-is they came from. The plot itself reminds me of another ’50s movie,
The Cosmic Monster
(l958), where a similar hole punched in the ionosphere allows monsters to come through from another dimension.

The
Planet Terror
half of
Grindhouse
took us back to ’70s drive-in double features: women with mini Gatling guns in place of legs; alien invasion; heroes and heroines reluctantly falling in love with the right wrong people. It’s as if American International Pictures had never stopped being ahead of (instead of behind) the curve, and if all the Corman trainees had continued turning out exploitation pictures instead of important films. . . .

The second part of the movie—
Death Proof
—is not SF or fantasy.

 

Stardust
was this past year’s equivalent of
The Brothers Grimm
from a couple years ago. Unlike that movie, there was no stuff so great (the gingerbread man, the horse that swallows the kid) that you were cheesed off that the rest of the movie wasn’t as good.

Stardust
sort of sat there; if it had been either better or worse the review wouldn’t have given me as much trouble. There’s one mythic scene in the film, Michelle Pfeiffer riding her goat cart across a long, Scottish Highland-looking road. The one compensating plot point: Everyone is out after the meteorite for their own individual reasons; it means different things/goals to different characters. The analogous objects are the wagonloads of whiskey in
The Hallelujah Trail
(1965). This shows more initiative than most movies since then.

 

I Am Legend
: Third time is not quite the charm.
The Last Man on Earth
with Vincent Price (l964) is still the closest in tone to the book. Will Smith actually convinced me he could act a couple of times in this one, and there’s some swell stuff of New York City reverting to the wild (with animals escaped from zoos, etc., and passing a gas station with the sign from December 2008 with Regular at $6.29 a gallon . . . ). I know—and you will, too—people who won’t see this because “something happens to the dog.”

 

The stylistic innovations in
300
were fine the first fifty times (the frozen sword-slash with its solid streak of blood), but paled by the hundredth, and they even continued into the still-frame end credits. And Spartans laughing at Athenians as “philosophers and boy-lovers” means someone (either the original graphic novel or the filmmakers) didn’t do a lot of homework.

 

The stupidest preview trailer of 2007—like a ’60s movie made by someone born in l980 who’d only heard of the l960s from their aunts and uncles—was for
Across the Universe
. With characters named Jude, Prudence, and Lucy, you know the songs you’re going to hear (although Julie Taymor, the director, knew enough to leave one of the songs exegetically to the end credits, outside the narrative).

Surprisingly, the movie works on its own terms (some of the chronology is slightly askew, but the ’60s mostly depended on where you were—some places got hotter quicker than others). Some striking visuals (as, of course, you’d expect from the director of the stage version of
The Lion King
). But it’s not all empty visuals, and in the old phrase “the personal is the political,” I didn’t want my money or my time back, which I had sure figured I would after seeing the massively wrongheaded trailer earlier in the year. But friends with some taste convinced me to see it.

 

The Last Mimzy
’s heart was in the right place—unfortunately they chose to update it (from the original WWII period) to these post-9/11 times, with Homeland Security involved.

They did concentrate on the characters, and they left their hands off the CGI stuff until the climax, a very subdued use of it these days. It’s no
Grand Tour: Disaster in Time
(made from Kuttner and Moore’s “Vintage Season” some years ago), which knew how to approach the story (even though it, too, was updated). But it tried. (The thrice-removed narration didn’t help, either.)

 

When I’d heard that they were making
Ghost Rider
, I hoped it would be the first-incarnation Old West version: no, it’s Nicolas Cage on a chopper now. (The Old West version is in one scene, when a ghost horse whose hooves strike sparks on the road rides alongside the cycle—it’s of course the best scene in the movie, and it should all have been like that.)

It’s not as bad as the remake of
The Wicker Man
a couple of years ago, which was the biggest waste of celluloid since
Manos: The Hands of Fate
.

By the way, Cage is in the fake movie trailers in
Grindhouse
, as Fu Manchu.

 

John Cusack, the actor who’s taken the most chances with his career of anyone currently working, was in
1408
; he’s usually not in films that sledgehammer you with effect after effect. There are some genuinely disturbing scary scenes early on (and one true scene; he’s an author doing a book-signing and a reading, and there are four people in the audience). It starts out as the usual, with a nonbeliever spending the night in a supposedly haunted hotel room (the title one, like the one in
The Shining
), and goes quickly downhill and sideways at the same time. Cusack’s good—it’s everything else that lets him down.

 

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
. The kind of movie that killed off Robin Williams’s screen career, only now it’s happening to Dustin Hoffman. As a friend said, “Hit me over the head with the whimsy-stick one more time!” The questions raised in the plot are left unanswered, and the block-of-wood McGuffin doesn’t figure in the dénouement. And it’s about the wrong character. A special-effects misfire: truly forgettable.

 

Sweeney Todd
was not a 2007 movie, not in Austin anyway.

 

I look forward with trepidation to the remake of
The Day the Earth Stood Still
this coming year. It won’t work unless it’s postmodern or it’s period. If it’s period, why remake it—just colorize the original and put half a billion in advertising it. If it’s pomo, will the 2008 audience understand it as well as the cinema-literate audience of 1951 understood the original?

There was no equivalent to
The Prestige
this year.

G
uillermo del Toro was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, but
Pan’s Labyrinth
is unmistakably a crown jewel of the Spanish fantastic cinema, possibly unprecedented in achieving commercial and critical success in America despite del Toro’s refusal to produce an English-language dub track. Until now, the Spanish-language branches of the genre (those native to Spain and Mexico) have typically yielded a volatile hybrid of the genre’s most garish and refined attributes, a heady sangria of blood, profundity, fruit, and Carnivál. With its masked wrestlers, brain-eating warlocks, and doll people, Mexican horror has long been among the genre’s most ghettoized subgenres in terms of international profile, yet—as del Toro’s latest film reminds us—it also boasts a heritage encompassing such masters as Luis Buñuel, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, Juan López Moctezuma, and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Likewise, Spanish horror runs the gamut from the eroticized pulp of Paul Naschy and Jess Franco to acclaimed art house titles such as Victor Erice’s
Spirit of the Beehive
(1974) and Alejandro Amenábar’s
Open Your Eyes
(1997).

Something that Spanish-language horror has always done exceptionally well is stories involving the very young and the very old. Guillermo del Toro bridged this generational gap into a single fable with his 1993 feature debut,
Cronos
, which also established his ongoing fascinations with insects, machinery, and religious iconography. Almost from the very beginning, del Toro has shown extraordinary promise of becoming the great unifying and uplifting force that Spanish horror and fantasy has always craved. He has taken a deliberately checkerboard approach to his career, following each new commercial project with a job more progressive and personal in nature. Make no mistake: even del Toro’s commercial work (
Mimic
,
Blade II
,
Hellboy
) is stylish and above average in intelligence, but his personal films—
Cronos
,
The Devil’s Backbone
(2001), and now
Pan’s Labyrinth
—are like no other films currently being made. Del Toro is a Mexican descendant of Cervantes, Francisco Goya, Jean Cocteau, Mario Bava, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Italo Calvino, Bruno Bettelheim, and David Cronenberg, whose most insistent impulse is to study from all angles the volatile story of twentieth-century Spain through the impact of its suppressive history on the frontiers of the Spanish imagination and subconscious.

With
Pan’s Labyrinth
, the whole of his work and creative reach is brought into brilliant focus—and this is surely the reason why so many critics have hailed it as del Toro’s masterpiece. Some closer to the genre may argue that
The Devil’s Backbone
was also a masterpiece, but certainly
Pan’s Labyrinth
is del Toro’s first magnum opus, a film that encapsulates his purpose as a filmmaker while simultaneously proving his ability to touch large numbers of people. We should take heart from its global success; not only because del Toro was able to produce such a film on his own terms (and not without sacrifice, as he diverted his entire salary to areas where it was more needed), but because, in this day and age, he has proved it is possible for even a sophisticated work of the fantastic to find a receptive American audience despite a resolute refusal to be Americanized. It represents a simultaneous triumph of the fantastic cinema, international cinema, and art house cinema.

The film is set in a rural area of fascist Spain in 1944. The young heroine, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), is the daughter of Carmen (Ariadna Gil), the widow of a tailor, whose loneliness and fear for her daughter’s future led her to accept the proposal of Capitán Vidal (Sergi López). Vidal, a stern and time-obsessed second-generation officer, has his expectant wife and stepdaughter brought to his present headquarters despite the precarious state of her pregnancy—“A child should be born where its father is.” An imaginative child, Ofelia has retreated from worrisome reality into her books of fairy tales and she finds the woods surrounding Capitán Vidal’s encampment rife with possibilities for fantasy. An insect found inside an old tree becomes a fairy, which introduces her to an inscrutable Faun (Doug Jones) who recognizes her as Princess Moanna, whose “real father” is the King of the Nether-world. The Faun presents to Ofelia
The Book of Crossroads
, a blank book that fills with hidden illuminations at her touch. It helps her to better understand the three tasks she must complete before the moon is full: she must somehow obtain a magic key from the belly of an enormous toad inhabiting a hollow tree in the forest; she must use the key to gain access to a special dagger in the possession of the terrifying Pale Man ( Jones); and the third task involves spilling innocent blood, necessary to opening the gates to the seven circular gardens of Moanna’s palace.