Final Girl Film Club - Amityville II: The Possession

I've got a bad feeling about this ...

Normally I'm kind of a completist -- I don't watch sequels or remakes without having seen the originals, and I never start a book series in the middle. I just like to know what's going on. (I also sleep with the lights on, but that's another story. Or is it?) So watching "Amityville II: The Possession" was an unusual experience for me, since it's a sequel to a movie I've never seen, based on a book I haven't read, and part of a horror franchise that I have no experience with at all. But I hadn't really heard good things about the other movies, or really about any of the books... still, this was for the Final Girl Film Club, which has not yet failed to introduce me to something new and interesting ("Phenomenon," for example). And anyway, "Amityville II" is actually a prequel, so there you go.

As I understand it, in the first movie Margot Kidder and her family move into a house where Something Awful Once Happened, and at the end they leave. The sequel/prequel covers the Something Awful that Happened, which apparently really did happen: Ronald DeFeo Jr., 23, shot and killed his parents and siblings in their home one night in 1974. "Amityville II" cheerfully changes the family's name to Monelli, then gussies up the story with extra gizmos, including demonic possession, Indian burial ground and incest.

Despite the ludicrous trappings, the first two-thirds of the movie are pretty straightforward: The Monelli family moves into a new house. They fight. The eldest son goes increasingly berserk and eventually out comes the shotgun. Knowing what's going to happen, it's just sickening to watch the tension build. Is it the house turning them on each other, or just amplifying their familial dysfunction? Although the movie's trappings are supernatural, the performances are good enough that all the characters seem organic. The father (Burt Young, who is indeed repellent) is a brute; his wife treats him coldly; the youngest children are scared. And poor Diane Franklin is terrifyingly vulnerable as the older sister. (I didn't even recognize her as the brilliant, mostly-silent comedienne from "Better Off Dead.") This is a family with real problems; the Indian burial ground in the basement is just decoration.

The family slaughter scene pretty well caps the movie; afterward there's some business about exorcism involving The Worst Priest in the World (who dashes out the door at the first sign of unpleasantness, then responds to Diane Franklin's pitiful pleas for aid by leaving on a camping trip). But the money scene is Sonny stalking through the dark house with his shotgun, hunting his family down one at a time. His surviving siblings huddle at the bottom of the stairs, unable to escape (you can't escape from family, after all), watching helplessly as his shadowy figure approaches and raises the weapon. They can't even scream. It's your very worst childhood nightmares come to life, and no amount of satanic trappings can keep that from being scary.

So thanks for the nightmares, Final Girl! I vote for something with maggots next time!

Pictures

Sorry, gentle readers, I got nothin' lately. And I'm off to Nashvegas in the morning so the situation is unlikely to be remedied. I've been outside a lot lately -- here are some photos of my friendly neighborhood Griffith Park, here's the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, and here is the unsettling Arthur Ripley Desert Woodland State Park. Many pictures of poppies and Joshua trees and strangely contorted desert flora!

When I get back, there will be posts about horror movies in which women are insane -- or are they? ("Cat People," "Let's Scare Jessica to Death," "Repulsion"); about the tomatoes growing on my garage roof and the carnivorous pitcher plants sprouting around my compost bin; and probably about the ongoing adorableness of my niece and nephew. I also aim to get back in gear and write a post for the next Final Girl Film Club, which will mean viewing the sequel to "The Amityville Horror," a film I have no previous experience with whatsoever but Final Girl has steered me well thus far. (By which I mean she shares my love of "Pieces."

I am going to try to avoid writing about the kittens, but below is their most adorable picture. There are more here.

Carnivorous plants in the Onion

Yay.

In photo: a lovely Sarracenia flower from a couple years ago. Multiple Sarraceniae are getting ready to flower again under my stairs. Perhaps you lucky readers will get to see pictures!!

I leave it entirely in your hands

Well, actually, I don't; I'm going to make you all sit here and listen to me blather on about the "Watchmen" movie. Hah! Lord, what a suspenseful few years waiting for this thing to get made, wondering if it was going to be any good, actually watching bits of "300" when it came on TV to try and get an idea of what director Zack Snyder might do with it. In the last few months, as the hype started to really build, I just stopped worrying. A bad "Watchmen" movie could no more affect the book than a bad novelization of "Citizen Kane" would affect that movie. It just doesn't need to be a movie. The movie doesn't matter.

So going into it with that outlook, the movie was pretty damn good. Thanks to Zack Snyder and his obsessive fanboy devotion to the source material, every scene has the right look. The cast does a nice job -- I particularly loved Patrick Wilson as Dan and Malin Akerman as Laurie, both of whom mixed vulnerability with their butt-kicking superherodom. They get the most emotional moments, which isn't saying much. It's a very cold movie. Still, they manage.

A bunch of scenes translate really well. The prison riot rocks, beginning with Jackie Earle Haley snarling, "I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me." Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian in Vietnam are just fantastic. Archie looked great. The opening credits have been justly praised -- they give you a perfect sense of scale. (I missed the gay subplot between Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice, but hey, hot Silhouette action.)

What was the deal of having Laurie be a nonsmoker, though? That seemed like an oddly priggish change. I always like the bit where she mistakes the flame-thrower for a cigarette lighter. I guess designing her little smokes-of-the-future was too much of a challenge.

My big beef is with Ozymandias. Playing him as a sneering, effete fop is just not quite right. He needs to be smart but he cannot be unlikeable, at least not before the very end. I guess a bunch of his scenes got cut out, hopefully including poor Bubastis, who shows up just long enough for you to be able to check her off your faithful-to-the-source-material checklist. But the actor plays him as an obnoxious little weenie. It ain't right.

I'm also not crazy about the non-giant-squid resolution. It's not so much the squid -- I willingly concede that it would have looked silly -- but the squid was meant to be an extraterrestrial attack that would cut the Gordian knot of international conflict. Having the resolution be not only terrestrial-based but ALLIED with the U.S. is just not the same. Having the disaster be an international one doesn't help it make sense. And then you only see one world leader declaring peace at the end (that distractingly awful Nixon). It's not as satisfying.

But, you know, whatever. It's not the book. In line to buy popcorn I mentioned to Art Boy (I can't remember how this came up, but he was appalled) that in the novelization of "The Empire Strikes Back," Han doesn't tell Leia "I know." Apparently the author was bugged by that line so he wrote something more boring, like "He gave her a crooked grin and said 'Just remember that, because I'll be back.'" But really, who cares? Getting outraged about "Watchmen" is sort of like getting outraged about that. Watch "Empire." Read "Watchmen." AE out.

Ki-ki-ki-ki Ma-ma-ma-ma!

Just in from the Friday the 13th remake. Hmm. It wasn't so much bad as it was sort of pointless. I had never seen any of these until a couple years ago, when Art Boy introduced me to the first one and we went on kind of a binge (here's the month with those posts if anyone is curious -- you have to scroll down) (yeah, I could be using these rainy days to tag my archives). I loved #1 and heartily enjoyed #2 and belly-laughed my way through #3. It's not a long history with these movies, but I did enjoy them.

So the remake? Meh. It was about a third as much fun as the "My Bloody Valentine" remake, and about one-twelfth as interesting as the "Halloween" remake (which was not itself very good). Jason scholars should get a kick out of some references: Jason jumping through a window, Jason briefly thinking the final girl is his mom. And slasher scholars can contemplate the changes in mores over the years. I think it's very interesting that smoking pot can now get you killed just as dead as fornicating can. What does this mean? The characters aren't very interesting, and none of it makes any sense, but that wasn't a problem for me in the first three movies. Really the worst thing about this movie is the total lack of atmosphere. It feels incredibly cold and clinical, from the perfectly waxed & buffed bodies to the unlived-in locations. Maybe in 20 years it will look better... but I doubt it. Still, if you're bored and feel like a movie, you could probably do worse.

I am actually pretty excited about the "Last House on the Left" remake. I haven't seen the Wes Craven movie but did see the Bergman movie it was based on, "The Virgin Spring." They share a plot: daughter gets murdered, parents get revenge. So judging from the previews of this remake, the daughter *doesn't* get murdered... she's apparently brutalized but survives. Does she get to partake in the revenge then? Is it more gritty or less gritty? (My money is on less gritty.) I am curious.

Children hate you!

In honor of the octuplets lady, here are some thoughts on David Cronenberg's "The Brood"!

Gosh, I just loved this movie. I didn't expect to. Years and years ago I saw "The Fly" and thought it was fine, but more gross than scary, and I assumed that would be the case here. And there's some grossness (see photo) but it's the tension and the bizarreness that really make this movie wonderful. It's a good while before you see the evil children, so the sense of dread really builds up. I love the first kill scene, which begins when the victim-to-be hears a muffled thump in the other room, and creeps toward the swinging kitchen door... This is totally the kind of movie that makes you scream "Don't go in there!" And once you actually see the children -- who are of course not children but physical manifestations of a divorcee's repressed rage -- the balance kicks over into the deeply surreal. The evil shorties in their little bright hoods are a great shout-out to "Don't Look Now," too...

It's fascinating. And somehow even empowering. I thought this movie would be all misogynistic and women-are-evil, but divorcee Nola develops this Carrie-like power. Somehow by having her dwarf creations beat the living daylights out of everyone who's ever gotten on her nerves, she achieves peace of a kind her miserable ex-husband will never know. She's certainly not a hero and things go no better for her than they did for Carrie White, but the movie still treats her powers with tremendous respect. Don't mess with a breeding woman, I guess.

Por fin

Por fin, I can be happy with Guillermo Del Toro again. Finally steeled up the nerve to watch "The Devil's Backbone" last night. I was all braced to loathe it, what with having hated "Pan's Labyrinth" and having viewed enough Spanish Civil War movies in college to kill a horse. But this 2001 film hits all the right notes. It's a good ghost story. It's a good war movie. It's scary. It's sad. It has beautiful colors. It has dead children and a teacher with a wooden leg. It has everything!

The setting is symbolically loaded: an orphanage for leftist kids during the last days of the Spanish Civil War. The director & teachers have watched, devastated, as their side has lost; their food supplies are dwindling, their options are running out, and they have all these kids with nowhere to go. The last boy to arrive is wee Carlos, who learns the orphanage has a resident ghost: that of a boy named Santi, who died violently on the premises. His ghost flickers through the bedroom and hallways at night but spends most of its time near a basement cistern. What does it want?

Unlike "Pan's Labyrinth," where you just get so exasperated with everyone you want to kick them in the shins, this movie gives you a great array of flawed, complex, identifiable characters. Even the villain has a tragic past -- he's the total opposite of the scenery-chewing fascist from "PL." All the action is all too believable. Del Toro does a great job of delineating the scorching sunlight of the external world -- where adults are, where the war is -- and the dark interior corridors of the orphanage, where Santi tries to communicate with the boys. But the two worlds inexorably overlap. The ending, in which a group of wounded boys limps haltingly out into the blinding sunlight, is both a perfect war-movie visual and a perfect ghost-story visual. He mixes the tropes just flawlessly.

And the ghost stuff is nice and scary. Santi is no Tomas, thank God, but he's plenty creepy. He's a little CGI-intensive but that's OK. All the ghost tricks you might expect, like footprints from an invisible source, the shadow of a hand that isn't there, an eye suddenly on the far side of a keyhole, are deployed so expertly. It's a pleasure to see Del Toro exercise his craft. It almost makes up for Hellboy 2.

Movie "pick" of the week! (Ha ha!)

By all means, go and see "My Bloody Valentine 3D." It is indeed a barrel of laughs!

And amazingly, it really honors the spirit of the original film. I missed the everyday camaraderie of the miners, and the denizens of the small town -- these characters spend most of their time standing around in shock or running for their lives -- but still, they're clearly working-class folks rather than your typical slasher victims. The killer chases two employees through a darkened grocery store and goes after a hotel desk clerk, a truck driver and a very unfortunate nanny.

But this movie is definitely less about the characters and more about the 3D. Here comes a pickaxe! Here comes a tree limb! Here comes an eyeball! Here comes a jaw! Oh man, the 3D is used to maximum effect and it just could not be more fun. It's cheesy but competent, intelligent but not snarky, and just on the whole a great ride.

There are some nice references to scenes from the original, too: something horrible in a dryer, the scene with all the empty mining suits (yes!), body parts in candy boxes (really, would a heart fit in one of those?). Sure, there are a couple bits that don't work -- the mine setting isn't used as intelligently as in the first film, and the scene where the killer walks along smashing light bulbs would be a lot scarier if it actually got DARK when he did that -- but these are quibbles.

You have to love a movie that, in its first ten minutes, gives you Tom Atkins walking into a carnage-filled hospital, surveying a bloody body's empty chest cavity, and snarling, "Happy f***king Valentine's Day."

As for Jensen Ackles, ACE... he is perfectly serviceable, if not really my type. Still, just for you, here is a gratuitous photo!

Time to lose your heart!

Sat down with Art Boy the other week and tucked into "My Bloody Valentine," the classic Canadian slasher being remade in 3-D. What a fascinating little movie! I thoroughly enjoyed it, start to finish -- even though Art Boy pointed out afterward that a) it does not hold up under any degree of analysis and b) it has no genuine scares at all. Still, it's so unique that it's just a real charmer.

First of all, it's set in a sleepy mining town, and our heroes are all working-class men and women -- not high school students, campers or babysitters. It all begins with a horrible mining accident, in which sole survivor Harry Warden is trapped underground for six weeks and has to subsist on the bodies of his friends, all because his colleagues on the surface blew off work in order to get to the town's annual Valentine's Day dance. A year later, Harry escapes from an institution and kills said colleagues, threatening to do the same every year that a Valentine's dance is held. Twenty years later, the town finally decides to have a dance, and guess what happens!

I am so in love with that premise. It's like nothing else you've ever seen. The workers and their gals care so much about this dance! They really hate to think about canceling it even after people start dying! They ignore the dire warnings of their bartender! The whole thing even closes out with a Gordon Lightfoot-style folk ballad, recapping the story in vague fashion ("The horror, from 'long time agooooo"). I can't talk about it without gushing. But it's not just that it's cheesy. The movie, oddly enough, makes this quirky little world believable, at least for a couple hours. The miners' banter, the run-down laundry room, the creaking mine machinery, the lived-in neighborhood bar... somehow it all works. You end up really rather concerned for these people.

It's stylish, too. There aren't any great scares, but the atmosphere down in the mine is fantastically creepy, and the movie intelligently teases you for a while until it actually gets you down there. My favorite though is the scene in the room with all the hanging uniforms -- it almost resembles Harry Dean Stanton's death scene in "Alien." (The death by pot of boiling hot-dog water is pretty imaginative too.) The final shot is fantastic, a perfect blend of gruesome (the severed arm) and stylish, with an eerie sound effect to cap everything. It's like listening to a predictable but still well-told ghost story. This movie's a real pleasure.

Apparently at the time it was a box-office flop. I watched an interesting documentary this week, "Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Flick," in which the movie's failure is blamed on its R rating. This was back when kids could get into pretty much any movie (lucky damn kids) and an R rating was seen as kind of a punishment, in this case because the makers were seen as Canadian carpetbaggers trying to capitalize on the new American slasher-movie cash-cow formula. Anyway, it's interesting that the remake is also rated R, and that will probably do nothing but help it at the box office, since no teenager is going to bother with a lame-o PG-13 movie. (Teenagers still say "lame-o," right? Oh, where are my bifocals?)

Side note: The remake is driving me up the wall with its tagline, "He's coming to break your heart." With a pick? He's going to *break* my heart or just drive a pick into it? (I don't think it's the same thing.) And he's not going to extract it and hide it in candy boxes for people to find? Drag.

Happy holidays!

Maybe Santa will bring me a new camera, because a couple weeks ago mine started taking pictures like this. I have no idea how it happened, but I love it. In the meantime, I give you readers this fascinating photo of a ranger station at Henninger Flats in the San Gabriels, taken a couple weeks ago when the sun was so bright I didn't realize how the photos were coming out until I got back to the car.

Have a wonderful holiday, everyone.

Kiss me good night, Miss Giddens!

And finally, to ring in the holiday season, I finally got around to watching "The Innocents" with Deborah Kerr. It's been on my list for years, since I read "The Turn of the Screw" in college. All I remember about that class (whichever class it was) was having to read five different essays that analyzed the story from five different points of view -- one saying the governess is a basket case, one saying the ghosts she sees are real, one talking about the children and their Freudian projections, and I don't remember what-all else. They were all pretty convincing and I came away with a mild headache and a deep-seated confusion about the story.

So it was really impressive to me that the movie upholds the same ambiguity. You're seeing it all in front of you, but you really can't tell what's going on. Miss Giddens (Kerr) is a fetching young governess who lands her first job ever after a flirty conversation with her cute employer. He explains, though, that she'll never see him -- he lives in London, and she'll be looking after his two young wards at his country estate. Still, she claims to love children, and she really seems to enjoy her work. But there's something weird about the children....

There is of course nothing creepier than creepy children, and the most awesome thing about these kids is that you never know if they're malevolent or not, but they're still utterly creepy. Young Flora prances around singing "O Willow Waly" (which turns out to be a song about mourning a dead lover) and slightly older Miles is just a little... precocious. Are they possessed? Are they just misguided? Is Miss Giddens really seeing ghosts through the windows? Even the ending leaves you wondering. But no matter what you think is going on, you have to enjoy the ride as Miss Giddens slowly loses it. When the ghost brushes past her in the schoolroom, oh my God, the hairs on my neck stood up.

I was also excited about this movie because it inspired Kate Bush's classic song "The Infant Kiss," which itself is pretty ambiguous: "There's a man behind those eyes... Oh, how he frightens me." Is it a love song or a song of terror? The movie walks the same line.

Brr. Let's take our niece and nephew's Christmas presents back to the store!

Secret stigma, reaping wheel

Next up in my festive holiday trifecta: the 1962 classic "Carnival of Souls." Wow! I don't think I've ever identified with a horror heroine quite so much. After a serious car accident, Mary (Candace Hilligoss, who only made one other movie, but it was called "Curse of the Living Corpse"!) packs up and moves to Utah for a new job as church organist. But she's haunted by creepy apparitions and horrific nightmares. She has episodes where she seems to become invisible to people around her - a saleslady looks right through her, sound seems to come from under water. And everywhere she goes, she sees the same smiling white-faced man, staring back at her out of mirrors, reflected in her car window, nearly bumping into her nose at the water fountain.

This all makes Mary a bit jumpy, and it doesn't help that she's already kind of an oddball for 1962. A healthy, intelligent young woman who doesn't want friends, isn't interested in the advances of the loutish tenant across the hall in her boarding house, plays professionally on a church organ but lacks religious conviction... she doesn't seem to fit in anywhere. Her landlady, her boss at the church and her doctor are all slightly baffled by her. You've already got the plot twist figured out, ten minutes into the movie, but it's fascinating to watch: on so many levels, Mary doesn't belong here. She belongs somewhere else.

It's creepy as hell to watch Mary's destiny close in on her. Gorgeous, too. Why aren't more horror movies set in Utah? The black and white cinematography makes the most of the sweeping, open landscape, especially around the vacant lakeside pavilion that irresistibly draws Mary: white skies against dark water. This would be great to see on a big screen. The soundtrack, almost entirely organ music, is gorgeous too.

As a fairly spacey person myself, with an often-tenuous grip on reality ("Where are my glasses? What's her name again? Wait, what year is this?"), I could powerfully identify with Mary's terror as her world starts to blur and something else starts to come in. It's a universal fear, this fear of losing one's grip altogether. James Thurber puts it this way in his introduction to "My Life and Hard Times":

It is unfortunate, however, that even a well-ordered life can not lead anybody safely around the inevitable doom that waits in the skies. As F. Hopkinson Smith long ago pointed out, the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.

Brr. Let's turn on some more lights and have some eggnog!

RIP, Bettie

She took such obvious joy in her body, it still sparkles across all of the years that have passed. Her life was quite troubled for many years. I hope she's found some peace. Good night, Bettie.

LAT obit
NYT obit (for "Ms. Page," don't you love it?)

There's a nice quote in the LAT's obit from artist Olivia de Berardinis:

It took me years to understand what I was looking at in the old photographs of her. Now I get it. There was a passion play unfolding in her mind. What some see as a bad girl image was in fact a certain sensual freedom and play-acting -- it was part of the fun of being a woman.

And that's exactly the key to her charm. You never get the sense, in her photos, that anyone but her is in charge -- she never comes across as exploited, but as someone who's playing a game, wielding her sexuality because it's making her some money and heck, it's kind of fun. She grew bangs to cover what she thought was a weird-looking forehead, but other than that, she never concealed anything. Bettie herself is quoted as saying, in 2006: "I want to be remembered as the woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form."

As the NYT correctly reports, Bettie was born in Jackson, Tenn. (not Nashville -- Jackson's down toward Memphis). Her pinup years were nicely immortalized in Mary Harron's movie "The Notorious Bettie Page," in which Gretchen Mol captures some of her vivacity (although that girl is awful skinny). She went through a religious conversion, a few unhappy marriages, and a decade in a mental institution, and ended up living out here in L.A. I always sort of hoped I'd run into her somewhere and we'd fall into a discussion about Tennessee, although she probably wouldn't have wanted to talk about Tennessee. Besides, it had been many years since she allowed someone to photograph her face; she wanted to be remembered as she was in her golden era. Which is kind of cool. She could have been any 85-year-old walking around out here.

There's a holiday angle to her story, as the NYT notes: "Her big break was the Playboy centerfold in January 1955, when she winked in a Santa Claus cap as she put a bulb on a Christmas tree." But I'll still be thinking of her this summer when I put on my Bettie swimsuit.

It's Christmas. Let's have a ghost story!

I'm coming off a trio of excellent ghost stories, my little pippins. I'll post about the other two later but will start off with my favorite: "The Woman in Black," by Susan Hill. This book has been on my to-read list for years but it's surprisingly hard to find. None of my last few libraries has had it and it's never in stores... I finally caved and included it in a big Amazon order last month. I read it on a visit home over two nights, sitting by the fire while my parents watched football. The racket of the TV kept me from getting too creeped out while the fire added nice atmosphere: it was a perfect setting for this classic ghost story.

The narrator is celebrating Christmas with his second wife and her grown children; he's enjoying the merriment and the good times when the family starts clamoring for a ghost story, and his mood darkens. He goes for a walk and remembers what happened to him many years ago, when he was a young, happily betrothed solicitor. His firm sends him from London to a northern town, to settle affairs for a client who's just died. No one in the town wants to talk about the client and her creepy old house, and no one comes to the funeral... but a mysterious woman in black appears in the back row during the service. When he mentions her, the reaction is shock and horror. She's a ghost!

This book has everything: a big creepy house on the marsh; ghostly sightings; ghostly sounds; a haunted nursery (yes!); a cute dog; and, most heartbreakingly, a very relate-able narrator who really does his best to pull himself together and do his job. You just deeply feel for the guy as events unfold. What would you do differently? Probably nothing. The pieces of the story fall inexorably into place around him, and there's no way he can escape.

At one point I was reading and gave a tremendous gasp. Mom looked up from the third down (or whatever football has) and I said, "He's alone in the house at night and the lights just went out!"
She said "How can you read those things?"

In 1989 the book was adapted for British TV, and I managed to track down a copy at the excellent Cinefile (and then kept it for an extra week -- sorry, guys). I had been working up this post in my head when I sat down to watch the movie, but afterward, I didn't want to even think about "The Woman in Black." It's taken me about a month to get it together enough to write this. The movie is absolutely terrifying. It nails all the best elements from the book, adds some good twists and some beautiful images, and gives you one scene that made me scream out loud here in the living room. Not a start; not a yelp; nothing that could be followed by embarrassed laughter, but a genuine scream of terror. (I had just taken a mouthful of hot toddy, which was extra tragic.) Oh my God. I've never seen anything like it. Final Girl has, as usual, an excellent review.

I understand the stage play is excellent as well, but haven't talked to anyone who's seen it. Apparently it makes explicit the terrifying subtext -- the reader/audience is as helplessly involved in things as the protagonist, so are we cursed too? Brr! Let's turn on all the lights!

Stealth in action

Apparently I saw a Stealth bomber yesterday, although at the time I thought it was a kite. It was moving very slowly and looked sort of aimless. Glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, drifting over the hilltops against a cloudy sky, it looked sort of like a distant Dementor. A few minutes later I was driving under it on the eastbound 110 and noticed it looked like a Stealth fighter. "Huh," I said, and watched it meander off into the distance, and then forgot entirely about it it until I saw Wil Wheaton's post about it just now. I was on my way to Art Boy's and he would probably have been pretty interested... oh well. We did see a guy on a Segway, which was exciting for us.

Anyway, I keep forgetting I live in a place where the thing that looks like a Stealth fighter might actually be one, and the nerdy scruffy old guy at the restaurant who looks like Dustin Hoffman might actually be Dustin Hoffman. It's not really ***OMG L.A.*** anymore, it's just where I live. Which is pretty nice.

Hang on, Bettie!

Fellow Tennessee native and retired pinup goddess Bettie Page is in the hospital this evening after having a heart attack. She's said to be critically ill. Send her your good thoughts, please. I don't think I can handle losing Bettie on top of everything else.

If the world is round, why is a frozen pond flat?

Wow, "Don't Look Now" was -- not at all what I expected. I'd heard of it as a super-scary horror classic and guess I was expecting something on the order of "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Innocents" in Venice. But wow, WOW. It's just like nothing else.

Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, of course, play a married couple whose daughter drowns in a pond on their property. Grieving and racked by guilt, they try to move on with a working vacation in Venice, where Donald restores old churches. There they run into a psychic who claims she can communicate with their daughter, and from there things get weird.

But things were pretty weird from the get-go. The opening sequence introduces the film's fragmented editing, full of quick cuts across space and time: from indoors to out, from the immediate past to the future. "Nothing is as it seems," murmurs Donald as he looks over some slides of churches. (It's so cute to see slides. And it's so funny that it's cute to see slides. While on the subject of cuteness, Donald and Julie have these great identical wavy perms that are almost hypnotic.) I watched the opening and then *immediately* skipped back to watch it again. It's gorgeous how the tension builds, and how you get a sense of Donald and Julie's closeness right off the bat; and how their daughter already looks like an otherworldly harbinger of doom.

What surprised me the most thought is just how unbearably sad this movie was. Not sad because a little girl dies; but because it shows you in the most visceral way that everything you love and believe in is just hopelessly fragile and transient. This movie's sex scene is famous for being graphic, but also for the way it flashes forward throughout to shots of Donald and Julie dressing afterward for dinner. The gimmick's been read as a joke or as an illustration of Donald's second sight, but I took it to mean that everything ends, even the most blissful feeling of connection. One minute one is rolling around in shared ecstasy, the next minute one is sitting on the same bed dressed in an uncomfortable suit, pouring some scotch and staring off into space. In the context of the end of the movie, the contrast becomes absolutely, unutterably heartbreaking.

As for the end -- the big reveal -- what's crazy about it is that you can't possibly prepare for it (I screamed out loud), but somehow, on some level, you *know* what he's going to see. You want to stop him and you can't. You're as helpless as Julie behind the iron gate. One day your story will end too, and your own finale will turn around and look you in the eye; and that's scary as hell.

Final Girl has a fab review, which I was excited to finally read after watching the movie! I also went and looked up the NYT's review and read Pauline Kael's review in one of my books; neither of those two enjoyed it much. (Pauline really hates it when she thinks filmmakers are just trying to be arty.)

Sigh

This week I joined Facebook and started watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" on DVD. In other news, I am 13.

The vampire is angry now!

For years I was warned off the old TV movie version of "Salem's Lot" by Betsy: "The vampire is made out of, like, blue Play-Doh, and his mask is so stiff that he can't actually talk, so the other characters have to supply his emotions by saying things like 'The vampire is angry now!'" Still, about eight years after I borrowed the book from her and was rendered sleepless for a week, it was time to check the movie out for myself. And she's right, it is pretty goofy (although to my disappointment, "The vampire is angry now" is not an actual line of dialogue) and the monster really is blue. You know he's coming, in fact, every time you see the color blue. This spells trouble for our hero Ben Mears, who likes to wear lots of denim, most troublingly a close-fitting short-sleeved denim blouse. On the whole, though... it's really not that bad.

OK, it's not great. The pace is slow and it crawls and crawls... you could argue that this is building up a sense of dread, but come on, when you immediately introduce a black-suit-clad weirdo living in a haunted house and driving a big black car, there's really no dread to build. I spent a lot of time thinking about horror movie tropes and wondering how anyone would not immediately suspect the black-suit-clad weirdo when bad things start happening. It's like in the Harry Potter books where they're like "The Death Eaters are back! It's probably Harry Potter's fault! It's certainly not Draco Malfoy's!" and you can't figure out if JKR is being sarcastic.

But then the vampire noshes on a little kid, and things just pick up from there. The movie becomes a series of really fantastic vampire set pieces. The wise old professor reading books labeled "Vampire Lore" in his library, and then hearing a noise upstairs.... the vigil over a sheeted figure at the morgue ... the movie fog outside the window parting to reveal a genuinely creepy floating child. And Barlow's first appearance, in extreme closeup (above), gave me the supreme willies.

It doesn't really go anywhere, and it's nowhere near as scary as the book. Scenes in the book that turned my hair white -- the boys walking alone in the woods, not knowing they're being stalked until it's too late; and everything involving the priest -- are pretty much ignored here.

Still, it's a hell of a lot scarier than the more recent TV movie starring poor Rob Lowe as Ben. My favorite scene in that had poor Samantha Mathis, starring as the vampire-turned Susan, appearing in Rob's window and delivering a crucial bit of exposition, talking like Susan even though she's supposed to be a vampire. "I could love you, Ben Mears," she concludes. Rob replies, reasonably: "Susan, you're a vampire."

Anyway, it was interesting to see Tobe Hooper's other good movie, having become besotted with him last year. I don't guess I will be checking out "Eaten Alive" or any of his other opi. This one doesn't have the sort of gorgeous and uniform look of TCSM.... the lighting is this sort of milky wintry light, and isn't really noticeable anyway since most of the scenes are indoors. Ah well.

Well, heck

It appears to be a bittersweet morning in California, with a rather mean-spirited little constitutional amendment appearing poised to pass. Here's hoping for a last-minute counting miracle. In the meantime: