OMG! That Was So Cool!--Sea Monsters in 3D

      My wife's six year old nephew and his family have been in town this week, so we've been looking for interesting entertainment options for them in the Triangle. Today we decided to take in Sea Monsters: a Prehistoric Adventure in 3D at the IMAX theater in Raleigh. The last time I saw a 3D movie was about twenty-five years ago, trying to balance on my nose a pair of those cardboard red/blue glasses that they used to use to create the 3D effects. That was also a sea monster movie--Jaws 3--and it was wretched, wretched.
      Well 3D has come a long way, baby. Obviously aimed at a young audience, and despite a few moments of dubious theorizing and over-dramatization a la the Discovery Channel, "Sea Monsters in 3D" was nevertheless enthralling from beginning to end. Mostly computer animated with a few live-action scenes of actors playing paleontologists and amateur fossil hunters, "Sea Monsters" dramatizes the lives of a few of the sexier species of prehistoric marine life. The visual effects are truly impressive, to the point that objects seem to actually pass behind you as they cross your field of vision. The theater was filled with school groups, and every menacing approach of a toothy leviathan elicited delighted screams of terror from the crowd. They would also wave their hands in the air in a futile attempt to grab the floating objects that did in fact seem within the viewers' grasp.
      I'm not sure who enjoyed it more--my nephew or me.

Sound and Fury--Polanski's Macbeth (1971) DVD

      I had never before seen Roman Polanski's Macbeth, but a film group discussion and the presence of Jon Finch in the lead prompted me to get it from Netflix. A quick glance around the internet turns up reviews that make much of the fact that this is the first film Polanski made after the Manson murders and his wife's death. I'm generally leery of biographical criticism, preferring to let the "text" speak for itself, but there's no denying that Polanski's Macbeth is by far the bleakest version I've ever seen (and I've seen "Throne of Blood"!).
      At first, I liked it. The cinematography is dark and claustrophobic; the sun is almost never seen. When it is, it appears as a faint, distant stain behind the clouds, or as a bit of blue sky, but always outside the dark gates of Macbeth's keep. I've always liked Jon Finch in Shakespeare (he did two really great Henry IV's for the BBC), and he's very good again here. Polanski's Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis), however, is a disappointing nonentity--she says all of her important lines, but this Macbeth needs little convincing, and she comes off as being weaker than he, which doesn't jibe with my reading of the play at all. If Macbeth is pure ambition from the beginning, then there's no tragedy.
      There's no doubt that this is the production of a talented filmmaker with the skill to transfer his vision to the screen. But Polanski's apparent vision of Macbeth reminds me of some of the complaints about the nihilism of "No Country For Old Men." MacDuff doesn't so much save Scotland as simply put a broken man out of his misery. When a filmmaker actually agrees with Macbeth that life is "a tale told by an idiot/full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," one can't help but wonder, "so why bother?"

When "Don't" Becomes a Positive Imperative--the "D" Songs

      As I continued tripping through my iPod, I discovered that I currently have 117 songs loaded that begin with the letter "D." Then I noticed that 20 of those songs start with the word "don't"--that's more than 1 in 6 of the "D" songs that start with the same negative imperative.
      At first I found this really depressing. Am I that drawn to the negative? I mean, I know that I can be pretty cynical; I've often spoken with friends about my affinity for "angry artists," the sarcastic and dispossessed who rail against Fate and shake their fist at God. I still have a very fond memory from high school of a poster I saw at Spencer's Gifts in the mall. The poster had reprinted a dictionary definition of the word "defiance" along with a cartoon of two figures--a mouse and an eagle. The eagle was diving, talons outstretched, toward the mouse, who, on the verge of death and with nowhere to run, stood baring his teeth at the eagle. And giving him the finger.
      OK, posters at Spencer's don't count as art, but I still love that kind of stuff, both in pop culture and in art. Was that the kind of impulse that had led me to collect so many songs that start with the word "don't"? Am I doomed to bitter old farthood, constantly complaining about the empty half of my glass and shouting at the kids to stay the hell out of my yard?
      Well, as it turns out, I may yet be redeemable. Because when I started looking closer at my "Don't" songs, I realized that despite the first word in their titles, many of the twenty songs turn out to be quite positive, if not downright Pollyanna-ish. Oh sure, there were a few downers, like Ryan Adams's "Don't Ask for the Water." With lines like, "Don't ask her for the water, she'll teach you to cry," that one can hardly be called positive. But quite a few of them can be, and here are some of the best:

• "Don't Give Up on Me" by Solomon Burke--King Solomon is one of those 60's-era soul singers who came up through gospel, but unlike many of them, he's still going strong (I think he recently did a show in Durham). "Don't Give Up on Me," the album's title track, is the plaintive plea of a man who knows he doesn't deserve a second, or third, or fourth chance, but he ain't too proud to beg. This track would easily have won its bracket in the "C" is for Crooner competition. His voice no longer has the silky smoothness it had in youth, but like Billie Holiday at the end of her career, Burke has learned how to milk a good song with impeccable phrasing and by infusing each line with a lifetime of hard-won experience. On this album he does some powerful covers of great songwriters including Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan. And he makes them all sound like soul. Nice trick.
• "Don't Let the World Get in Your Way" by The Jayhawks--You may have noticed that The Jayhawks turn up a lot on these "best of" lists. Catchy melodies, intricate harmonies...if radio and music TV weren't such corporate, creative wastelands, and if the goddess of music were still in her heaven, these guys would be multi-platinum superstars, the American Beatles. In fact, you should click this link right now and buy one of their albums. Do it! Do it!
• "Don't Need Anything" by Glenn Phillips--Phillips is the former lead singer and main songwriter for the now-defunct Toad the Wet Sprocket, one of my favorite bands of the 90's. His solo album "Winter Pays for Summer" doesn't match his best work with Toad, but a few songs stand out, including this simple, almost naïve little melody for one voice and piano. It's essentially a list song about contentment, naming the humble collection of things the narrator has, and always returning to the refrain, "I don't need anything that I don't have." How's that for a positive use of "don't?"
• "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House--this one has already turned up in a previous iPod discussion, so I'll just say, "Don't dream it's over...when the world comes in, they come, they come, to build a wall between us; you know they won't win."
• "Don't Give Up" by Peter Gabriel (with Kate Bush)--The most desperate and least obviously positive song on this list is rendered even more poignant by the hope it ultimately offers. Gabriel's part lays out the bleak narrative of a redundant man. Unemployed and unable to find work in hard times ("I never thought I could fail...no one wants you when you lose"), his distress grows to thoughts of suicide. But at each crucial moment of his despair, Bush's ethereal voice intrudes with her simple but fervent encouragements ("when times get rough, you can fall back on us; don't give up, please, don't give up"). Despite the song's grim portrait of a perplexed man at the end of his rope, it's Bush's voice that we hear last--"Don't give up, you know it's never been easy; don't give up because I believe there's a place, a place where we belong."

I Am Legend (2007) DVD

      I purposely avoided seeing "I Am Legend" in the theaters because, while I'm usually pulled in by Will Smith's effortless charm and generally enjoy the movies I've seen him in, the original novella by Richard Matheson upon which the movie is loosely based was one of my earliest and favorite adolescent encounters with the horror genre. The landscape of movie adaptations is littered with the horribly mangled corpses of my favorite books. So when I finally gave in and rented the DVD, I fully expected to hand this review over to Smokey Burner at the Curmudgeon's Corner for a good old-fashioned rant. However, I'm forced to admit that although the movie not only ignores most of the original story, and in fact betrays its central premise (thus rendering the title meaningless), it doesn't really deserve the Full Smokey. Taken on its own, "I Am Legend" compares favorably to most of the monster movies that Hollywood currently produces, and if it had only followed through on a few promising moments, could actually have been pretty good.
      The movie opens with Robert Neville (Smith) as the last living human in New York and perhaps the world, having inexplicably survived a terrible virus (engineered as a cure for cancer) that has killed most of the population, and turned the survivors into ferocious, vampire-like zombies that come out at night to feed on...well, we're not really sure. Despite being an intelligent scientist, Neville employs what might be the least-likely-to-succeed method of deer hunting since the invention of the thrown rock--attempting to shoot them (and drive) as they run from his speeding sports car (try an upper-storey window, genius)--but the chase offers some cool establishing shots of a post-human New York City. With his faithful German Shepherd dog Sam, Neville spends his days collecting foodstuffs, working his way through the DVD's at the video store, and researching a cure for the zombie virus in his extremely well-set-up basement laboratory. He spends his nights behind shuttered windows, huddling with Sam in an empty bathtub until the zombies go back to bed.
      This all sounds pretty stupid, and I guess it is, but Smith manages to hold one's attention in his essentially solo performance, with a little help from Sam. And just when the viewer might be tiring of dealing only with them, two more survivors appear--a young Brazilian woman, Anna (Alice Braga) and the boy she cares for, Ethan (Charlie Tahan). Neville's shaky interactions with them--he's been alone with Sam for three years--create some of Smith's best scenes in the film. Unfortunately, their arrival marks the beginning of the end of the interesting portion of the movie, and the rest devolves into a standard-issue, jump-scare CGI fest, with ridiculously fast and powerful zombies serving only as bogeymen to drive the final action.
      It's too bad, because for a moment, following a scene where the zombies actually trick Neville into a life-threatening situation, I thought the movie was set to explore the latent humanity in the zombies, whom Neville has viewed to this point as mere beasts. Such an exploration would have led naturally back to the very themes that make the original book so interesting--when there's one (or three) of you and hundreds of thousands of them, maybe they're the future of the human race, not you. Sadly, pursuing those themes apparently would have required too much effort, either from the filmmakers or perhaps from the audience expected by the filmmakers. In any event, thanks to Smith, what we're left with makes for an entertaining-enough rental--especially if you've never read the book.

SPOILER ALERT AND WARNING: Animal lovers should know that there are a couple of very disturbing scenes involving Sam. While they're not at all exploitative, being central to the plot and very well-acted by Smith, anyone who is disturbed by bad things happening to animals should be prepared.

Making Smithereens

      I'm not normally the bloodthirsty type--I don't own any weapons and I've never had much interest in hunting--but neither am I immune to the primal, center-brain appeal of guns, loud explosions, and blowing stuff to smithereens. Not critters--just stuff. Recently, a friend of mine who owns guns and, more importantly, maintains a safe and sensible attitude toward their ownership and use (remember, pop the magazine and then rack the slide), introduced me to the joys of target shooting. No blood is spilled, and no asses are frozen off in duck blinds or deer stands. But things still go BOOM, and, with the proper kind of target, there are smithereens aplenty. Perfect.
      At some point back in college, I had fired off a few rounds from a .22 revolver on a camping trip, but my gun-owning friend took me to a proper handgun range to try out his Taurus .45 semi-automatic. Even with ear protection, the noise on a handgun range is pretty shocking and required a few minutes of "flinch adjustment." Then the guy in the lane next to us opened up with his .44 Magnum, the booming report of which drew curious, what-the-hell-was-that glances even from the experienced shooters in the room and created percussive bursts of air so strong that I could literally feel them in my gut, like the bass at a rock concert.
      Handguns really are bizarre, visceral machines, in a way that nothing else is--not even long guns. No toy gun can convey the weight and the queasy feel of potential that a serious handgun with a full clip imparts to its holder. Before I picked up the gun, I was a fat, easy-going freelance writer who wished no one harm; after I picked up the gun, I was still a fat, easy-going freelance writer who wished no one harm, but I was also uncomfortably aware that simply by turning around and extending my hand, I could end somebody's life. I think that's where the the real difference between long guns and handguns lies. When you hold a long gun it feels like a tool--dangerous, certainly, like a chainsaw, but still a tool--and therefore external to your self. A handgun feels like an extension of your hand, and you quickly internalize it as part of you. Thus, the queasy feeling I mentioned.
      So while I enjoyed the handgun target shooting (and did pretty well BTW), I was much happier when my friend introduced me to shotguns and "sporting clays" at Deep River Sporting Clays near Sanford (yes, my friend is very generous with his guns and ammo). "Sporting clays" is a lot like golf with shotguns. Really. The shooters move from station to station, where pairs of bright orange clay disks are launched in different settings and flight patterns designed to emulate the movements of different game birds. There are even a few "rabbits," which are clays that are launched bounding along the ground. With the kind of expert instruction that my friend provided, even a total beginner can hope to make a few smithereens, and the sense of satisfaction upon disintegrating a particularly tricky "bird" is surprisingly deep. Like golf, you need to learn a few proper mechanics to be successful, but, also like golf, the more you allow the mechanics to become habitual and the less you actually think about them in the front of your brain, the better you do. Slow, lazy, drifting clays actually prove more difficult for me than the low, quick crossers because I have too much time to think about the former and simply have to react to the latter (Station 11 is my house, Jim).
      While taking up a hobby like sporting clays is probably a little too expensive for me right now, and while I'm not likely to purchase a handgun anytime soon--even for self-defense--I'm still glad I've had the opportunity to experience them both firsthand. At least now, when civilization ends, I won't have my brains eaten by the zombies because I couldn't figure out how to load the shotgun or disengage the safety on the .45. How embarrassing would those final moments be?

Prog Rock Lives!

...as long as there are precocious 10-year-old Japanese organists to "Carry On." I think the hat and boa were a nice nod to the '70's--sort of a mild Elton John kind of vibe. Note that while this would have brought down the freakin' house at any American middle school, our shy rocker only generates a smattering of polite Japanese applause.
      That's alright, Tanaka. You Rock On!

Open the Pod Bay Doors, God--Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)

      Arthur C. Clarke, owner of the brain that brought you communications satellites and the most famous imaginary computer in history, the HAL 9000, died today in his adopted hometown of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Along with a handful of other old school scifi storytellers like Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Niven, Clarke kindled my early love for the genre. Reading his stories made me want to invent my own; reading his best work makes me want to give it up out of despair of ever producing anything half so good. To paraphrase a famous Clarke line, any sufficiently advanced writing (he said "technology") is indistinguishable from magic.
      Anthony Minghella, director of the films "Truly, Madly, Deeply," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," "The English Patient," and "Cold Mountain," also died today. Somehow it seems sad that despite such an impressive résumé, he will always be at best the second most accomplished artist to die today.
      I know it's not a contest. But, still.
ADDENDUM: 3/20/08
Arrgghh! The Rule of Three just kicked in, and now one of my very favorite actors, Paul Scofield, is dead. "A Man for All Seasons" will always be one of my top five beloved films thanks to Scofield's moving performance. Man, what a crappy week.