This Wizard Business

I haven’t been keeping up on Harry Potter since I read the first book and saw the first movie in 2001. In an earlier e-mail incarnation of these postings, I offered my opinion. I now submit it again edited, but still held.

I’ve read the book. Seen the movie. Now my report on the matter.

When I finally read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a few short weeks ago, it was already sagging under its fame. Thanks to the juggernaut of modern post-movie Hollywood (they haven’t made films or movies in decades; it’s all product spinoff now.) we have not a fine children’s book that’s transcended its intended audience like Alice in Wonderland or Winnie the Pooh, but the phenomenon of ballooning expectations, punctured by oversell.

While initially enthusiastic, I finally found the novel entertaining, but rushed and perfunctory. J.K. Rowling draws her inspiration from two English storytelling traditions: the schoolboy novel (Tom Brown’s School Days) and the sturdier, enchanting tradition of the fantasy (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis). But her voice is modern: straightforward and spare. She seems to take for granted the wizard world that Harry enters and so, it seems, does Harry and everyone else. It’s meant to be whimsical and sometimes it is funny, but in rushing to tell a breathless story, Rowling misses something I need in any alternate universe story: a sense of being there: that feathery touch of poetry that seduces me into believing in Harry’s world as much as my own.

For example, just what does Hogwarts School look like? We don’t get much of an idea as Rowling sums up Harry’s first look at this supposedly wonderful place in a brief and uninspired paragraph: No sense of landscape, drama or awe. The book never feels “as real as a dime,” to quote Dashiell Hammett’s description of M.P. Shiel's The Lord of the Sea, another adventure classic.

True, I’m being a Muggle about a book aimed at preteen boys, who may be bored by that much detail (Full disclosure: at eleven years, your correspondent was attempting, badly, to read Dr. Zhivago).

But this does raise a question: how have the Harry Potter books managed to leap into the warm embrace of grown-ups, many of whom presumably remember Alice in Wonderland and The Hobbitt?

I’m not an expert on the English whimsy/fantasy tradition (I prefer their supernatural tales) but I do remember that sense of “being there” in The World of Pooh. Like I could look out my window and see A. A. Milne’s furry befuddled creatures wandering right through my snowy back woods in Lake Mohegan, New York. A recent re-reading of those tales poignantly confirmed my nostalgia. Milne’s stories are short, but the sweet details of Pooh’s universe are chosen right, supported by E.H. Shepard’s vivid drawings and watercolors: A remarkable feat for a book written seventy-five years ago for an audience younger than young Potter’s.

“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” never got that close. It reads more like a Hardy Boys adventure, and really, who among you has ever re-read them and cried like babies? I finished Harry Potter with a shrug and hurried on to The Fellowship of the Ring which, whatever its problems, creates a world as real as Hammett’s dime.

In that respect, the spectacle recently rolled out by Hollywood genuinely tries to bring Harry Potter to visual life. It does conjure up some of what Rowling’s prose missed. Especially impressive is how the wizards douse the neighborhood lights during the opening. The special effects for the Quidditch match are shaky, but the film makers imagine it well and cleared up my confusion about this Polo on Broomsticks.

The film was shot at numerous old English schools, so nothing looks like a set. It all feels rightly British, thanks especially to the adults in the cast including Richard Harris, Maggie Smith and the transcendentally evil Alan Rickman, whose Professor Snape deserves his very own movie. The second Rickman bounds onto the screen like Basil Rathbone or Vincent Price on steroids, the movie springs to magical life. Too bad they didn’t make more use of him. (Never mind the kids; they’re *all* terrible: Next to them, Haley Joel Osment looks qualified to play Hamlet.)

Finally, the movie suffers from the very Harry Potter phenomenon itself. J.K. Rowling was understandably fiercely protective of her creation, and as are its millions of readers. But the film makers wind up chained by the material. With a mob of fans armed with torches and pitchforks ready to storm the set at the first sign of tampering, there wasn’t much they could do with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone except shoot the Classics Illustrated version. They include only a lame wisp of the amusing dragon incident, when they should have cut it altogether. The ending lacks suspense (The only surprise is that main villain Voldemort looks amazingly like, of all people, Lee Van Cleef!)

In a sense, it’s a shame that Terry Gilliam, who was touted as the original director, didn’t get to turn his wizardly eye on Harry Potter. But that may have resulted in his burning at the stake and the reduction of Warner Brothers studio to rubble, no matter how well the movie stood on its own, which all good adaptations must do.

REMINDER: The blog will be on vacation until August 12! Thanks for stopping by!

When Boy Wizards Go Bad: Thoughts on "Chronicle"

 

Harry Potter: Good KId or . . . DEMON FROM HELL!?

As the Harry Potter phenomenon was dawning in the late 1990s, I surfed across an online analysis claiming the books were especially appealing to boys because of how “empowered” J.K. Rowling’s tales made them feel.

Oh? I thought, my eyebrows arched and brow crinkled by memories of those horny, violent, and tempestuous years. And is this always a good thing?

The novel I subsequently tried to conjure from my furrowed brow in response never formed properly, but screenwriter Max Landis and director Josh Trank found some ingredients I didn’t and came up with Chronicle, a predictable, but nonetheless suspenseful, entertaining, and extremely well-acted sci-fi thriller fable of those tormenting teenage years, that also jabs an elbow at our media-addicted age.

Steve (Michael B. Jordan), Matt (Alex Russell) and Andrew (Dane DeHaan) are three Seattle high schoolers. (Seattle here played by South Africa!) Of the three, Steve is Mr. Popular; Matt stumbles and stammers about, but shows promise; Andrew, the last and lowest, is most marginal of all: extremely abused, extremely lonely, and, obviously, extremely angry. Morbidly shy and socially inept, he can only corral his volatile passions within the refracting lens of his digital camera. Outside the frame, the world means little.

One night, after being pounded through the floor by a bully and thrown out of a rave, Andrew runs into Steve and Matt who drag him and his camera over to some mysterious woods and down into a colon-contoured cave. At the end of this cave nests an alien blue-green arachnoid crystal that emanates a strange force.

After the boys return to the surface, they find they are slowly developing telekinetic powers, the ability to move objects at will. Impulse control is almost always an issue at that age and while they try their best to keep their growing powers within moral bounds, well, with young Andrew’s world falling apart everywhere he turns, we just know that’s not gonna work out.

The film’s camerawork is especially intriguing. The camera becomes a character and also another object in the film that Andrew can manipulate, as he lifts it into the air to place himself in the frame, making himself a narcissistic god. As director Trank controls what we see, Andrew also controls the world through the lens.

Chronicle is not clever plotwise, but the movie knows itself and its genre well. At the same time, it avoids drying up with post-modern ‘tude. There's a funny nod to the Quidditch game in Harry Potter and even a hat-tip to Stephen King’s Carrie. Otherwise, it admirably sticks with its story, its characters, and their impact on their world.

Stylistically, Chronicle is a “reality” or “found-footage” film, a genre popularized by 1999’sThe Blair Witch Project. The bare-bones technique seems very well-suited for contemporary genre pictures and has been pleasurably exploited in Cloverland, [REC] (and its American remake Quarantine), and Paranormal Activity.

With their “live” footage shot with digital handheld cameras, these movies turn their budgetary and technical limits in virtues. The best of them stir a claustrophobic terror within their anxious frame, helped by the apparent spontaneity of their performers. The good ones at least (and there aren’t many) seem more “real” than more expensive movies.

Also, in the tradition of earlier sci-fi horror films (especially those from the 1950s), they are pleasingly short. Chronicle skips by in 83 minutes. The genre permits—maybe demands--more efficient use of screen time. The use of jump cuts—pioneered by Jean-Luc Godard—refract the antsyness of our shaky times, especially as young folks experience it. These movies have a refreshing on-the-fly energy.

The success of these movies does not depend at all on their screenplays (which seem to have been scrawled on coffee-shop napkins), but on their camerawork, editing, special effects (added later) and—most importantly--the skills of their actors. On this last point, Chronicle scores a hit--all three young actors are excellent. Their rapport, seemingly improvised, feels real and affecting, and even though we can predict every plot point, the expression of feeling between them and their unformed inner lives add greatly to the suspense, which, as Hitchcock used to say, is character.

Text copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

(Re-edited 3/23/12)

Photo from Movie Insider

[Note: I’m off next weekend, but do not despair! I shall return the following week!]

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Splendid Villains #1: Alan Rickman

Alan Rickman, who passed away recently (to great disappointment and surprise), was a terrific movie villain, one of the best to ever stride the screen. Like all fans of movie bad guys, I was thrilled to my toes by his debut as Hans Gruber in 1989’s Die Hard, a scene-stealing turn worthy of Sidney Greenstreet’s in The Maltese Falcon.

In most of his villainous roles, Mr. Rickman played the civilized and smooth ultra-sophisticate type: courtly, often British, definitely with an international flair. They speak with mellifluous diction and take their tea every afternoon at four on the chimes, heartlessly sipping Earl Gray with their pinkies up, as they watch their minions torture and toy with the hero. If they tend toward the Germanic—like Herr Gruber--they might listen to Beethoven Quartets as they beam at der Fuehrer’s portrait.  (You can always tell the Bad Guy: he’s the one with manners and good taste!)

Rickman was both a great villain and the very best of actors, as he proved time and again throughout the 1990s and 2000s, in films such Sense and Sensibility, and the achingly bittersweet Truly, Madly, Deeply. 

 

As Rasputin

And he could also play characters from society’s lower depths. If you can find it, watch his Emmy-winning, unforgettable turn as the title character in HBO’s Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny. Here, Rickman played the flip side of Hans Gruber, as the rough, pseudo-mystical peasant opportunist who helped bring down the Romanov Dynasty. Alan Rickman could play lowlife villainy with a panache equal to his upper crust characters.

Rickman demonstrated one of my favorite Hitchockian adages: the better the villain, the better the movie. He was the only—really the only—good thing about Kevin Costner’s lumbering Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as George, Sherriff of Nottingham (putting him in direct line with another great well-mannered scoundrel, Claude Rains from the still-best Errol Flynn Robin Hood.) A hammy performance? Sure, just what a movie like that needed.

Another striking Rickman memory comes from the first Harry Potter film, The Philosopher’s Stone. Just when that picture was threatening to sink to the bottom of my cold pond of memory, Alan Rickman as Severus Snape bounded into the classroom and for a short time, ruthlessly grabbed the movie all to himself like a kitten he’s eager to drown. The rest of the movie is vague to me, and I never saw any of the sequels.

And now that he’s gone, I’m considering setting out on the Harry Potter journey after all, just to watch Alan Rickman (I can doze through the rest.) I said it once before here and I’ll say it again: Snape starring Alan Rickman, and then everybody else, preferably cowering and running in terror. It would have been a great movie.

Like all the greats in his particular class (among them Basil Rathbone, Conrad Veidt, Vincent Price, and James Mason), Rickman’s villainy played to a sneaky feeling that civilization is but a disguise for the brute beneath; their pinpoint style and snobby manners are mere seductive filigree and Satanic hypocrisy. Their elegant surfaces reflect in an inner vileness; these surfaces can’t be trusted. They may even be sexually fluid, though you very seldom see them locked in embrace.

Such men, as they mostly are, float over or glide past like airships, separate from the physical grime and sleepless nights experienced by the those with the Spirit of Conscience. Regarding themselves as free from consequences, they do as they damn please, and make it look very easy.

That’s part of a splendid villain’s appeal, that sense of wish fulfillment. While Alan Rickman and his ilk allow us to focus and unleash our hatreds in a relatively harmless direction, they can also live out a secret dream. Especially for many males who live with fear and boil with resentment and disgust at our tormentors who may also be simultaneously be our inferiors.

His characters may live in some kind of Movie Hell, but Mr. Rickman himself surely lives in heaven.

Copyright 2016 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Living Room Bijou: Dogs and Scruggs

Along with so much else, the 2018 holidays have taken a strange turn. Even the climate of holiday movies has shifted. For as long as we can remember, starting at Thanksgiving, Hollywood has rolled out its big pictures for the year: If it’s not Star Wars, it’s James Bond; if not Bond, then Peter Jackson or Michael Bay might lumber out with another Hobbits Meet the Transformers epic, or something equally overweight or overwrought.

This blighted season, however, there seems to be no must-see for-everyone movie, nothing to get us out of the house during those afternoon dead spots when the turkey is cooling down. The closest candidate seems to be the katrillionth version of Robin Hood, which, early reviews indicate, is yet another go round that leaves Errol Flynn and Michael Curtiz securely laughing on their heavenly thrones. (Think about it: eighty years and no onehas bettered Mr. Flynn as Robin Hood. On that score, Hollywood should bury the Robin Hood story in a tomb and just re-release the 1939 version forever. Take it from me and a million others: stay home with Errol Flynn.)

In fact, you might as well stay home in front of a warm TV. And, if not for its ferociously mature content, I’d partially recommend The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the latest offering from the remarkable, always interesting, Joel and Ethan Coen, now available on Netflix.

Buster Scruggs combines two movies we see little of nowadays: 1) a Western and (2) a portmanteau movie. Anthology movies are most always a mixed bag and this one is more mixed than most, a weave and jumble of old styles and contemporary attitudes as seen through the Coens’ amused and bleak gaze.

The film frames its six stories by use of a facsimile of a western anthology of the type written in the 1900s by Stuart Edward White, illustrated in the manner of N.C. Wyeth. It’s a pleasing nod to an old Hollywood style of storytelling.

First comes the title story, featuring Tim Blake Nelson as Buster Scruggs, an immaculately white-clad cowpoke, strumming his guitar, singing a song, riding along through John Ford’s Monument Valley and right into bullet-packed trouble. As we learn at slapstick speed, his sugary exterior is a mere shell laid over a hair-trigger pistol-spinning psychopath.

The joke is a bit obvious (or maybe I’m a bit old) and B-movie cowboys, such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, are fat targets for parody. But thanks to Nelson’s indomitable cheer, along with the Coens’ visual imagination and slapstick flair, the sequence is very funny, involving a swell gag involving a poker table, followed by droll visions of angels.

From there, slapstick turns to farce with “Near Algodones.” James Franco plays a luckless bandit whose brief career runs through one necktie party after another. (We picked up on hints of Hang ‘Em Highamong other references.) There’s a clever line near the end, but the jokes go flat here.

“Meal Ticket” is memorable almost solely for its conceit: Liam Neeson plays a traveling freakshow impresario whose sole attraction is “The Wingless Thrush.” The Thrush is an armless, legless actor (well played by Harry Melling, a Harry Potter alumnus) who recites Coenesque mashups of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, the Bible, Shakespeare and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to audiences of bored, lonely miners trapped in wintry mountain camps. 

The sequence is mostly a series of dissolves with the camera fixed on Melling’s face as he recites his way through the classics of nineteenth century literature, smoothly edited together to remind us of the Coens’ manner of blending tropes and genres. To the Impresario, the Thrush is but a fancy windup clock. Outside issues of bodily functions—one of them provoking a brief bark of sick laughter— the two men never interact.

The freak show is a success at first as it wanders from camp to camp, but as it goes on—and it does go on—the takings start to dwindle (along with, I admit, my interest). Finally, weary of having to wait um hand and foot on his charge, Neeson resorts to desperate measures to turn his fortunes after an encounter with a calculating chicken. 

For a minute, as my ever-clever wife remarked, it looks as though the sequence would climb the sublime heights of “One Froggy Evening.”  I have little doubt the same idea crossed the Coens’ devilish minds--it sure would mine--but they seemed content to leave it as an anecdotal campfire tale.

The same may be said of the following sequence, “All Gold Valley,” adapted from a Jack London story. Tom Waits channels Gabby Hayes as a gold prospector who lays waste to a pristine mountain paradise. In fact, it’s Tom Waits all by his lonesome until the very end. The underlying environmental message, however, sparks little interest, putting this sequence near the bottom of the pile. But even with the worst westerns, there’s always the scenery to look at. That applies here, too.

The Coens do finally strike real gold with the fourth tale, “The Girl Who Got Rattled.” Adapted from a story by Stuart Edward White, it’s much the best by a prairie mile.

We meet a young woman (Zoe Kazan) and her bull-stubborn, incompetent brother on a wagon train to Oregon. After her brother dies, she’s drawn into a poignant encounter with the train’s wagon masters, played by Bill Heck and Grainger Hines. 

For once the Coens drop their trademark snigger and chilly post-modern detachment to tell a sad, but thrilling yarn in eloquent but plain style and with heart—something we don’t often see from them. For once, they stop looking down on their characters and try to engage them eye to eye. With simple but excellent compositions by cameraman Bruno Delbonnel and sets and lighting by God, it’s a golden pleasure to watch.

It brings back memories of many a good western of old, including those directed by Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann. Zoe Kazan is excellent, but someone should cast both Bill Heck and Grainger Hines in another western as soon as possible. Both actors bring saddle-weary truth to their roles, proving that Randolph Scott still rides.

Unfortunately, the movie loses a shoe and goes lame at the end with “Mortal Remains.” The pyrite of the lot, it’s a Stagecoach Meets Twilight Zone affair whose ending we saw comin’ ‘round the mountain long before its gabby characters did, in a tale more static than claustrophobic. Death is rarely a surprise in a Coen Brothers film and it’s sure no surprise here.

Grumbling aside, it’s pleasing to see filmmakers like the Coens once again tackle the western, as they did so well in True Grit. At its best, Buster Scruggs is an expression of both deep love for and ambivalence toward this most American of film genres. Even so, it runs hot only once and lukewarm-to-cold for the rest. It’s no holiday movie, but one for late night, after children and more sensitive souls have long gone to bed and into dreams of angels and sunny prairies.

We saw Buster Scruggs before Thanksgiving was even on us. During Thanksgiving, the TV sat like a plain black rectangle as we preferred the state of hypnosis induced by a jigsaw puzzle. It wasn’t until Friday, with almost everyone else gone, that we noticed the TV in the room—not for a jumbled epic, not for some antic thriller, but for a Netflix documentary about . . . dogs.

Dogs (an on-the-wet-nose title to be sure), is a six-part documentary series about the roles that dogs play in the lives of the neediest among us. We’ve only seen two chapters so far and have been enchanted and moved.

The first episode, “The Kid with a Dog,” deals with Corinne, a severely epileptic teenage girl who’s so in the grip of her condition that she can never ever be left alone, not even in sleep. Her family is committed and loving, but even they are cracking under the strain by the situation. Finally, they turn for help to a “labradoodle” named Rory who’s been trained to detect seizures and raise the alarm when they arrive.

“Bravo Zeus,” the second episode, follows Ayham, a refugee from the Syrian Civil War who now lives in lonely exile in Berlin, Germany. With the help of an NGO, Animals Syria, he arranges to smuggle his beloved (and very charming) husky, Zeus, from the horrors of war-torn Damascus. Next to this real-life story, most fictional thrillers look a little pale.

The series theme song is the worst sort of treacle, but feel free to plug your ears. Once we got past that, we found both stories deeply moving and hair-raising in their own fashion (even for this cat lover). While portraying the emotional bonds between people and their pets, it also, without making too much of itself, hints at some of the wider complications lurking about.

Rory’s work, while greatly easing the strain, only goes so far in helping Corinne’s family, as her mother must still sleep in the same room with her. Their future still looks bleak. Dogs can do a lot but they can’t do everything.

As for Ayham and Zeus, a utilitarian ideologue (among other moralists) will reject Ayham’s priorities and ask whether any resources should be spent at all on “mere pets” in the midst of so much human suffering.

It might be better though to save our fury for the war from which man and dog fled. When Zeus comes bounding into the airport and into Ayham’s arms, objections fall away and Love remains standing.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now out! His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark won the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal and The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

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