Captain Couch Potato watches After.Life

For me, the release of new work by certain directors, screenwriters, and actors is cause for celebration. I'm not talking about the people who work all the time whose movies I like; Hollywood practically guarantees at least two Woody Allen movies a year, some great, some not so great.

No, I'm talking about the folks who don't work as often as I'd like them to (whether by choice or because no one wants to hire them): David Lynch, Noah Baumbach, Hal Hartley, Crispin Glover, Winona Ryder, the list goes on.

And that list also includes Christina Ricci.

I liked her in her film debut, Mermaids, though as a 17-year-old boy at the time I was far more interested in the aforementioned Winona Ryder. Christina's screen-presence was far more intense in her next film, The Addams Family, in which her deadpan portrayal of the creepy Wednesday Addams pretty much set the tone for a significant subset of her career choices thereafter.*

I lost track of her for a few years until she turned up for a tiny but cute role in the so-so comedy/drama Summer Fling. As an American high school cheerleader visiting Ireland, she made a big impression on me. And of course her memorable but stone-faced role in The Ice Storm made an even bigger impression. But it wasn't until I spent one Saturday afternoon in New York City, circa 1998, watching two Christina films (Buffalo '66 and The Opposite of Sex) back-to-back that I decided she was one of my favorite actors.**

Now that I was hooked, I was rewarded with four years of not-very-good movies (though there were a few almost-gems [Pecker, Prozac Nation] among the duds [Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Desert Blue, 200 Cigarettes, No Vacancy, Sleepy Hollow, Bless the Child, The Man Who Cried, The Gathering]). Then came Pumpkin.***

And that's pretty much the cycle Christina's movie career goes through: an occasional good movie (Monster, Black Snake Moan) surrounded by duds (Cursed, Speed Racer)--but even the duds are pretty spread out. So I take what I can get.

My feelings about After.Life are pretty well summed-up in that previous sentence. It is, in other words, not very good.


Christina is Anna Taylor, an elementary school teacher who dies in a car accident. Or did she? Die, that is. I suppose this is the question we're meant to believe is at the heart of the movie.


But really, it seems more like an excuse to film Christina in a skimpy blood-red slip and, later on, completely naked (not just for a scene or two, but for the final third of the movie). If the writer/director weren't a woman I'd be highly suspicious of the entire endeavor.


The movie had lofty aspirations, but in execution these aspirations devolved into pretensions. I can see how Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo wanted her horror film to be the next Sixth Sense, but it's just too sloppy to operate on a higher cinematic plane. After.Life is rife with gaping plot holes, silly dream sequences, fuzzy internal logic, pointless chase scenes, and minor characters who were clearly meant to serve as important clues to the central mystery but instead serve as unnecessary dead-ends.


The cinematography is nice, though.


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POINTLESS FOOTNOTES

*Many of the films she chooses to star in are, if not downright creepy, at least a bit odd (e.g., Penelope, Pumpkin, etc.).

**Ten-plus years later, The Opposite of Sex doesn't hold up so well on repeat viewings (a disappointment, particularly because I'd also put Christina's costar, Martin Donovan, on my list of actors who work seldom enough that I tend to receive his new projects with glee), but Christina's performance in that movie remains one of her better ones. And though I'm loath to admit this, my relationship with my wife (who, coincidentally enough, looks like Christina Ricci and Alexis Bledel's long-lost sister) in some ways mirrors the Billy-Layla relationship of Buffalo '66 (though not in a creepy way, I swear), so that movie remains close to my heart despite my mixed feelings about Vincent Gallo.

***Eight years later, I still don't know what to make of Pumpkin. Is it an indictment of vain sorority girls or an ill-conceived attempt to poke fun at our society's P.C. attitudes toward the handicapped? Or, worse, does it make the timid mistake of trying to be something in-between? (Probably the latter.)

Captain Couch Potato watches Remember Me

'Spoiler' warning: If you plan to see this movie at any point in the future, please don't read this posting. Although the movie doesn't have a "twist" ending in the traditional sense, the following is primarily about the events at the end of the film.


Remember Me begins with the murder of one person and ends with the murder of some 2700 people, but--in the context of this movie, anyway--we are expected to care about only one of the latter.

Nearly a decade after the events of 9/11, I suppose it's now OK to appropriate those events in the service of art, as long as the end result isn't overly exploitative or sensationalized. However, the terrorist attacks of that day remain terrorist attacks, and as such they were acts of a political nature, but Remember Me is not a political movie. In fact, if politics can be defined generally as the overarching bureaucratic relations among the citizens in a given society and its governing body, then Remember Me is the exact opposite of a political movie. It deals, primarily, with the intimate, personal interactions between family members and loved ones.

On the other hand, perhaps the movie is a close approximation of what it must have felt like to have lost a loved one on 9/11. The individuals in and around the World Trade Center towers, and those on the planes, were not political agents, they were civilians. In this way, Robert Pattinson's character, Tyler Hawkins, mirrored hundreds of other people who died that day: They lived their lives, as varied as those lives were, and then they were killed for reasons that had nothing to do with them personally. Their lives up to that moment had no authentic relation to the despicable political actions that led to their deaths. As such, the movie's denouement is pretty effective as a portrayal of this senseless loss of life.

But although the death-toll from that day is staggeringly large when compared to other events of this nature, the victims and their immediate families comprise a relatively small portion of the population. One could argue that, because the movie harnessed the terrible power of 9/11 only in its last few minutes of screen-time, it appropriated the pain of a few individuals for the sake of a story that was not about 9/11 at all (except inasmuch as the movie was a story about the loss of loved ones, and how such losses affect those left behind).*

Imagine From Here to Eternity if, instead of a private in the Army, Montgomery Clift played a civilian boxer who was merely visiting his father on an Army base, which turned out to be Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941--but the audience didn't find this out until the last two minutes of the film.

When Titanic was in theaters I remember some people complained that it exploited its subject matter. The RMS Titanic had a finite number of victims (1517), yet the movie focused on two fictional people who were not actually on-board the vessel when it sank. Why didn't James Cameron focus on some of the actual victims or survivors of this historical event? Personally, I don't share this objection to the film, primarily because of some of the ways in which its approach differs from Remember Me: First, Titanic is a movie about the disaster and deals directly with the people and events that caused the disaster. True, these events are subplots to the primary (and completely fictional) plot of the movie, but it also deals with the people who were on-board and who lost their lives--even if the portrayals of those individuals were mostly fictional as well. Finally, Titanic was released 85 years after the actual sinking of the Titanic, at which point there were only a few remaining survivors--all of whom had been less than a few years old when the Titanic sank and had no memories of the event.

September 11, 2001, however, is still very much in everyone's minds. In addition to the thousands who lost their lives, that day eventually led to two wars that are still taking place,** which have each resulted in thousands of additional lives lost. Perhaps even moreso than Pearl Harbor, the attacks of 9/11 irrevocably altered the course of history. It's such an awesome (in the traditional sense of the word) event that, even nine years later, it's hard to completely wrap my mind around exactly what it means. Is an event of such incredible power well-served by being tacked onto an otherwise personal story about a young man seeking to reconnect his family with his estranged father? Was it essential that Tyler Hawkins be killed in the north tower for his death to have the impact that it does within the context of the story?

Regardless of this nagging question in the back of my mind, I did enjoy the film. Much was made of Robert Pattinson's performance in the film (even if its box-office numbers were not particularly impressive), and I'm not the first to say that he reminded me, perhaps intentionally, of James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. More enjoyable, though, was his chemistry with costar Emilie De Ravin (best known for her role as Claire on Lost). In my opinion it's rare these days for romantic leads to seem like they really belong together onscreen,*** but I believed them as a couple. As Roger Ebert noted in his review, the film would have been much better if it had focused more on their relationship and less on the melodrama surrounding Hawkins and his family.

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*Though if the writer, William Fetters, lost someone in the 9/11 attacks, then this is of course a moot point.

**Despite the "end of combat operations" in Iraq, scheduled for August 31, 2010, the combat isn't over quite yet.

***Several contemporary romances (e.g., Valentine's Day, Leap Year, When in Rome, etc.) seem to have been cast strictly for the appeal of their stars as individuals, rather than as a couple.

Overrated Writers, Underrated Books

Huffington Post contributor Anis Shivani unleashed his scorn on a handful of novelists, poets, and literary critics last weekend in his article "The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers."

Because he picked on literary luminaries such as John Ashbery and Amy Tan instead of hacks like Dan Brown (whose exclusion from the list presumably had something to do with shooting fish in a barrel), Mr. Shivani stirred up quite a shitstorm on the ol' Internet (which was, no doubt, his plan; and it worked, since the article is currently one of the most popular pages on the Huffington Post).

Anna North over at Jezebel takes Shivani to task for indulging in the same species of "bad" writing of which Sharon Olds, Junot Diaz, et al., are supposedly guilty (in the aptly, and hilariously, titled article "Literary Critic Hates Vaginas, 'Ghetto Volume'"). As she ironically points out at the beginning of her article, "People are obviously reading too much these days. That must be why one critic felt the need to list the 15 writers (9 of them women) we should all stop reading right now." Though I enjoyed Shivani's spiteful putdowns (particularly of William T. Vollmann, who seems to have had it coming) in the same way I shamefully enjoy visiting What Would Tyler Durden Do? every once in a while to see what crazy antics Lindsay Lohan is up to, I have to agree with North that, in this era of the screen (be it television or computer) prevailing over the page (be it book or magazine), there's not really that much to be gained from dismissing writers with any amount of literary worth, or perhaps even from discouraging reading of any kind. Despite knowing with certainty that The Da Vinci Code is the worst-written book I've ever read (yes, I read it, and yes, it's written in a style even worse than most young adult novels of the silly Gossip Girl, Twilight variety), I can't in good conscience begrudge people who would just as soon read it as watch an equivalent amount of TV. On the contrary, more power to them!

Alison Flood, a blogger at the Guardian, provided one of the more measured reactions to Shivani's diatribe with "Who Are the Most Overrated Contemporary Writers in the World?" But what I really appreciated was her more constructive follow-up posting: "Who Are Your Favourite Underrated Writers?"

Since she asked, I'd make a case for Tibor Fischer (particularly because of his hilarious novel The Thought Gang) and at the top of my list is Gene Wolfe, whose Book of the New Sun tetralogy is possibly the best book(s) I've ever read. Beautifully written, with a vocabulary that requires a conscientious reader to have the OED on-hand (since Merriam-Webster's won't cut it in this case), The Book of the New Sun rivals any book in which language is a centerpiece, without being too flashy (a no-no in Shivani's eyes, who derides "showboating" as a sign of bad writing). The primary reason it's underrated is that it's been undeservedly relegated to the sci-fi ghetto. This is a shame, because a writer like Margaret Atwood (another favorite writer of mine, who's fortunately not underrated) often uses science-fiction elements in her novels (such as The Handmaid's Tale, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood) to address larger issues--as the best sci-fi novels often do--yet still manages to get her books onto the best sellers lists. As Alison Flood (her again?) points out, the series does have its champions (including, perhaps most notably, Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin), but hardly the widespread adoration it deserves. I don't know, maybe it's the misrepresentative heavy metal album art on the covers that's to blame:



In any case, covers aside, The Book of the New Sun is better than C. S. Lewis's Narnia series and just as good as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, each of which have their places of honor in the larger arena of literary fiction.