Laurabelle's Blog

I created my dæmon on the Golden Compass movie site. Friends, do you think a tiger dæmon is right for me?

My latest movie from Netflix is Peau d’âne (Donkey Skin), a French film from Charles Perrault’s fairy tale of the same name. If it were an American movie, I would have expected a complete adulteration of the story. This version was more or less faithful to Perrault’s story, but I was still a bit disappointed because it didn’t add anything more. There’s a lot to be done with that tale (witness Robin McKinley’s Deerskin).

Intermittently during the movie, characters break into song. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Python, but every time the prince started singing, I kept expecting someone to cut him off. That’s not even the only Holy-Grail-esque element; at the end of the film, a helicopter appears! According to IMDB, Peau d’âne was made in 1971 and Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975. I have to wonder if this little French fairy tale wasn’t part of Python’s inspiration for their take on legend.

Last week Jeff and I checked out Total Recall from the Oakland Public Library. Jeff thinks this is one of the few passable movies involving Schwarzenegger (if not the only one); I’m not sure I would be so generous with my praise.

In any case, the point of this post is not to critique Arnie’s acting. The point is that this is a movie about humans on Mars.

By chance I ordered Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra at the same time. And I do mean chance; I had absolutely no idea what these books were about when I ordered them, only that they were written by C. S. Lewis, that Jeff had read and liked Out of the Silent Planet, and that we owned the third book of the trilogy and thus that I was obligated to lay my hands on the first two before opening the last.

Out of the Silent Planet is a member of the first, classic generation of science fiction, where almost nothing was known about the conditions in the deep ocean or on the other planets in our solar system, and therefore fantasy was allowed to roam freely where it is now lamentably restricted by fact. For example, the hero of Lewis’ novel simply pokes his head out of his spaceship and breathes freely of the Martian atmosphere.

Anyone familiar with the premise of Total Recall cannot fail to be struck by the contrast. Still, I would be hard pressed to concede that the post-moon-landing movie is any more realistic than Lewis’ seventy-year-old tale.

Jeff and I saw MirrorMask yesterday evening, and it was even better than I had expected. I won’t even attempt to describe the movie; nothing I could say would do it justice.

The correct response to the phrase I’ll know X when I see it is now What if it was the chicken?!

Quoting from memory:

Victor: I wanted you to meet my family. I wanted you to meet my crazy grandma and my bitchy sister.

Judy: Why?

Victor: 'Cause that's me.

Good movie. Go check it out from your local library.

Last night Jeff and I watched Das Experiment, a German film about the Stanford Prison Experiment gone horribly wrong. (Okay, the SPE gone even more horribly wrong.) Twenty men volunteer to participate in a two-week simulated prison experiment. Eight of them are randomly selected to be guards; the remaining twelve are prisoners. At first it's all a game, and everyone laughs and jokes. On the second day, tension appears and begins to escalate.

I had seen the film before, about a year and a half ago, but Jeff had not. Watching it again, I picked up on signs of tension, the first hints of the feminization, humiliation, and eventually outright violence that were to follow. The movie is sick, but the sickest thing is that it's quite realistic.

See the movie. (Check it out from your local public library!) Then visit the SPE website and go through the slide show. Then let me ask you this: What is the purpose of imprisonment? What is the purpose of being tough?

Jeff and I saw The Return of the King, and it was great except for several glaring mistakes that ruined my suspension of disbelief. For example, the sword of Isildur was fragmented so badly that if it were repaired, it would be ugly as hell, not the shiny perfect blade shown in the movie. The most glaring mistake was the lava flow at the end; Frodo and Sam should have been baked by the heat. The overflowing lava was a change from Tolkein's version, and I wish that Jackson had left it alone.

The problem with changing bits of someone else's work is that the stuff you put back in doesn't have the same voice as the original bits. I cringed every time Liv Tyler made an appearance (damn actors' contracts). I also hated the soppy happily-ever-after scenes at the end; while I could accept cutting out the battle of the Shire, the replacement ending was so saccharine and meaningless that I wish I had left before the movie finished.

The saddest thing, I think, is that many people (both children and adults) will see the movie without ever having read the books. Maybe they'll read the books afterward, but if they do, they'll hate the books for the same reason I hate the movie: it's not the same. The shallowness of the movie will have corrupted their ability to appreciate the depth and complexity of the setting, characters, and plot in the book. On the other hand, maybe some of them will still like the books better. I certainly hope so.

I almost certainly wouldn't have seen this movie if it hadn't been free. Nevertheless, I found it truly excellent. It's not by any means an all-time great, but it's hilarious, especially in the way it plays with stereotypes.

The main characters are Steven and Danny, a gay couple in Manhattan who have told their parents that they're running a catering business. In fact, they're mafia hit men, and they can't tell their parents, because the father of one of them works undercover for the FBI. That pair of parents comes for a surprise visit, and so they fabricate a dinner party, with the mafia family and other friends, to keep up the cover.

So much for plot. Who cares about the plot, really? The delicious thing about this movie is that the two gay men are violent hit men, very good at their job, while the don's two sons, who are married with children, live to cook and sew (and are miserable when their parents try to make them into something they're not). The stereotypes are there, but they're consciously intended and completely twisted. The verbal jokes (Who am I, the fairy godfather?) are the icing on the cake.

This movie could have turned out crude and trite, but in spite of its stereotypes, the characters appear rounded and human. Perhaps the stereotypes are even the cause, as conflicting stereotypes combine in one character. When you've got a mafia thug who happens to be gay, you can't help but think of him as a person, because the stereotypes don't even pretend to fit. Overall, it is a surprisingly delicate and sensitive treatment of a conflicted topic and a powerful argument that homosexuals (and maybe hit men) are just people like anyone else.

• Friends & Family Official Site
• IMDB: Friends & Family

Another movie night chez Pete, and the showing was another French movie, La Vie revée des anges (in English, The Dreamlife of Angels). I have to say right off, one of the things I really like about this movie, and maybe about furrin movies in general, is that the people look real. You know, the people I generally see on sitcoms or on magazine covers look good until I try to imagine them in real life, and then they just look ridiculous. I could totally see Isa, Marie, Charlie, or Chris on the street, maybe not in the USA but certainly in France. People had scruffy hair and purplish eyes.

By the way, one of the characters was named Fredo. My mind kept on wanting to make him Frodo, so it's a good thing he looked nothing at all like a Hobbit.

The story centers around two young women named Isa (short for Isabelle) and Marie. Isa is an optimistic go-getter who has trouble finding long-term work but who doesn't shirk at selling handmade cards on the street if she has to. With all her possessions on her back, she travels to Lille (a heavily industrial city almost on the Belgian border - see this topographic map of France if interested) to stay with a friend, who had run off to Belgium in the meantime. She manages to get a job in a clothes factory and, on her first day there, befriends a woman named Marie. Marie consents to let Isa stay in the apartment where she is living, and thus begins their friendship.

Like Isa, Marie has trouble finding work, but she is too proud to admit to needing anything, including a job. She won't take any work that she thinks is beneath her, she won't work towards anything she might want, and she lashes out violently and irrationally at anyone who criticizes her. She's also locked in a pattern of victimization; she can't see any way to live other than to be on top or on the bottom of a relationship.

I don't want to tell much more of the story, because I don't want to ruin it for anyone else. I'm just really struck by the complete juxtaposition of these two young women. Isa is an eternal optimist, taking any honest work that comes to her, never saying no to an opportunity. Okay, she's not completely honest (she tells people the cards she's selling are for charity), but at least she's not just sitting on a street corner begging for change. (Marie's reaction: I don't beg.) She sees no harm in asking, even if she figures the answer is probably no, and she takes her knocks and moves on. Although she's an opportunist, she's also generous and caring, spending her days by the bedside of a comatose teenager in whose home she's living. (This generosity of spirit possibly explains why Fredo, who has a thing for Isa, gives her money even though she told him honestly that she wouldn't sleep with him.) Marie, on the other hand, constantly tells Isa scornfully that everything she does is stupid and pointless. Marie is unable to move her own life forward, to create meaning for herself, only to tear other people down.

Some particularly astute readers may be able to ascertain where this is going. I won't say any more, other than that the movie makes a perfectly clear statement about which kind of person it's better to be. Although I don't like Marie very much, I feel sorry for her, and I wonder whether it would have been possible to do anything for her, to get her out of her cycle of self-loathing and victimization. If she were given a hope to help herself, would she have taken it, or would she have scorned it, out of pride or perhaps out of fear that she might have to face her demons?